
CHURCH AND SECULAR LIFE 



m 



l^m-m- 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Shelf. .M.^ CO 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE 



CHURCH AND SECULAR LIFE 



BY 



FEEDERICK WILLIAM HAMILTON 



" The kingdom of the world is become the kingdom of 
our Lordy and of his Christ " 



-0<'i*JO«- 




S^^HO^- 



BOSTON 
UNIYERSALIST PUBLISHING HOUSE 

BOSTON AND CHICAGO 
1894 



K 







COPTBIGHT, 1894, BY 

UNIYEESALIST PUBLISHING HOUSE. 



Nottofloli 33«g8 : 

J, S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith. 

Boston, Mass., U.S.A. 



The eight lectures wMch follow were delivered 
at the Church of Our Father, Pawtucket, 'R.I., during 
the winter of 1893-4. Encouraged by the kind recep- 
tion then accorded them, the writer ventures to sub- 
mit them now to a larger circle of readers. 

Pawtucket, R.L, Oct. 26, 1894. 



CONTENTS. 



-*o^ 



PAGE 

I. The Church and the Life of Men ... 1 

II. The Church and Education 18 

III. The Church and Charity ....... 48 

IV. The Church and Business 78 

V. The Church and Labor 104 

VI. The Church and Politics 137 

VII. The Church and Reforms ....... 167 

Vin. The Church and Society 197 

V 



I. 

THE CHURCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. 



The Cliristiaii Churcli, using the term in its broader 
sense, is a vast institution consisting of individuals 
bound together more or less closely by a common or- 
ganization, and standing for certain truths which it 
seeks to impress upon the minds and hearts of men 
for their own individual good and for the good of the 
race. This Church has had a strange, interesting and 
eventful history. It has made many mistakes, com- 
mitted many sins, taught many errors. It has labored 
for magnificent ideals, inspired men to noble life and 
heroism, kept the light of God's truth shining in the 
earth. Like every purposeful institution it has always 
been and will always be on trial as to its faithfulness 
and as to its efficiency. Whoever and whatever as- 
pires to lead humanity must always accept and answer 
the challenge of humanity to demonstrate its right to 
lead. That the challenge is now being pressed in 
such wise as to make many good people tremble for 
the future of the Church, and to tempt them to ill- 
judged means for its defence. 

B 1 



Z THE CHURCH AND THE LIEE OF MEN. 

The challenge is not impious. Humanity has an 
inalienable right to demand that its professed leaders 
should demonstrate their divine right to lead, that 
divine right which comes not by the individual's acci- 
dent of birth, the institution's hoary antiquity, or the 
doctrine's solemnly formal promulgation, but by demon- 
strated power, usefulness and truth. The challenge is 
not new. It may have taken a new form and have been 
pressed recently in more intelligent fashion than 
before, but in some shape or another the Church has 
always had to meet it, either as the imperious demand 
of inquiring minds or the yet more inexorable require- 
ment of changing conditions. The challenge is not 
captious. The instinct for progress is part of the law 
of progress. The aspirations of the race are natural 
and ineradicable, though not always wise or prudent 
in their expression, and this very challenge of leader- 
ship is proof of their activity. A humanity constantly 
enlarging in extent of mental horizon and in power of 
apprehension and comprehension must have a progres- 
sive and enlarging leadership, its ideals must be ad- 
vanced, its aspirations enlarged and its yearnings in 
some measure gratified. 

There seems to be much significance in the follow- 
ing item taken from a recent issue of a religious paper: 
"Why do men not go to church? was asked by a 
Philadelphia paper, and then three pages were given 
to the printing of a part of the replies that were sent 
in. These replies were from all sorts and conditions 
of men, and all seemed to be united in the conviction 
that there was nothing furnished by the Church which 
the men of to-day need." Accepting attendance upon 



THE CHURCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. 6 

public service as a rough and ready gauge of interest 
in the Church and of acknowledgment of its leader- 
ship, we find that these men, representative because of 
their numbers and because of the diversity of their 
conditions, have turned away from the Church as the 
result of a deliberate conviction. They are not simply 
indifferent and self-indulgent, they are not vicious or 
rebellious, they are not repelled by an oppressive estab- 
lishment or by a self-assertive hierarchy. These re- 
plies do not sound like the excuses which are too 
frequently offered in answer to inquiries of this sort. 
The clergyman finds it very difficult to get a reliable 
answer to such a question. The person asked hesi- 
tates and equivocates because of his personal regard 
for the questioner or because of a hesitation to affront 
openly a great institution in the person of its accredited 
representative. But this question comes from layman 
to layman, and the answer is not embarrassed by any 
of these restraints. These men say freely that they 
have asked the Church and themselves what this in- 
stitution has to offer that they need, and the answer 
is little or nothing. They have asked the Church and 
themselves whether or not their aspirations are met 
and their desire for leadership satisfied, and their 
answer is in the negative. 

It is very easy to stigmatize such a conclusion as 
foolishness, or to dismiss it with some remark concern- 
ing the wickedness of the unregenerate heart and its 
natural enmity to God, or even to take the higher 
ground that because men are not conscious of needs 
which the Church can and does meet it does not fol- 
low that they do not have such needs. All this would 



4 THE CHUBCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. 

be very easy, but it would also be very hasty and 01- 
considered. We are not justified in assuming that all 
who differ with us are either foolish in mind or wicked 
in intent, even after we have given all due weight 
to the enlightening influences of religion. It is un- 
doubtedly true that in religion, as in other spheres of 
life, men have many needs which they do not realize 
till after they have been gratified, but in order that 
men should progress at all they must have certain 
common and natural needs, and the religion which is 
to help and lead their progress must meet these needs 
which exist in all as well as the others which it itself 
creates, or at least reveals, in a few. If any great 
portion of the people feel that the Church is not meet- 
ing their needs, one of two things must be true : either 
the Church is an obsolete and powerless institution, or 
its teachings are being imperfectly presented and its 
work unskilfully done. 

The work which the Church is doing to-day in many 
places and with multitudes of people ought to be proof 
positive to any candid mind that the first position is 
untenable. The fact that the Church meets the needs 
of so many is as strong proof of the value and useful- 
ness of its work as the fact that it fails to meet the 
needs of all is of the inadequate performance of that 
work. There must be something wrong, and that 
wrong must lie, not in the nature of the Church itself, 
but in the way in which it is administered, and the 
manner in which it conceives of its mission and aims 
and presents them to men. If we will examine, even 
cursorily, some of the positions into which the Church 
has allowed itself to drift, we shall have no difficulty 



THE CHURCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. 5 

in finding some things which will go far to account 
for the attitude of men toward it, even if they do not 
justify that attitude. 

The word Church has come to be used altogether 
too much as if it meant only the ministry. This is 
hardly less true of Protestantism than of Catholicism. 
The Church ought to be in the fullest and widest 
sense democratic in administration as well as in con- 
stitution. Instead it has become aristocratic or mo- 
narchical. The action of the clergy is held to be the 
action of the Church. The thinking of the clergy is 
asserted as the thinking of the Church. The universal 
priesthood of believers, so strenuously asserted in the 
New Testament, has degenerated into the priesthood 
of a class. The impression has been sedulously 
strengthened that there is no Christian ministry ex- 
cept the ministry of the clerical office. Men have 
been encouraged to forget that the first ministry insti- 
tuted in the infant Church by the Apostles was the 
ministry of the Diaconate, a ministry of service, a min- 
istry that had to do with the common-place things of 
material life. Men have lost practical hold upon the 
facts that every believer has a full part in the Church 
and in its ministries, and that everything that is done 
for the benefit and the service of man should be done 
as unto God, and when done in that spirit becomes as 
much his ministry as the performance of sacrifice or 
the offering of prayer or the preaching of sermons 
can be. 

The Church has assumed only too often an invidious 
position of privilege. That there are such things as 
election and privilege, and that they are very real and 



6 THE CHtJRCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. 

important tMngs, must be admitted, not simply on tlie 
teacldng of Scripture, but on the obvious teaching of 
daily life. It is a privilege to be born in America 
rather than in Dahomey or Siam. It is a privilege to 
be born in the nineteenth century rather than in the 
ninth. It is a privilege to be born to comfort and 
refinement and Christian culture rather than to pov- 
erty and ignorance and the debasing companionships 
of the slums. It is a privilege to have high and noble 
thoughts concerning God and duty and spiritual things 
rather than the low outlook of selfishness and mate- 
rialism. But it does not follow that some are arbitra- 
rily chosen for the sweet things of this life and heaven 
hereafter, and others for bitterness here and damnation 
there. It does not follow that the elect have any 
right to take airs over the non-elect, to look conde- 
scendingly down upon them as their inferiors, or to 
regard them as the outcast and reprobate children of 
the evil one. There is nothing more hateful to God 
and man than ecclesiastical exclusiveness and spiritual 
pride. The election of God is election to heavy re- 
sponsibilities, to unbounded opportunities, and to the 
privilege of widest service. It ought to bind men 
more closely together rather than separate them. It 
ought to weave between the hearts of men the clinging 
bonds of tenderest and warmest affection, rather than 
build between them the chilling walls of pride, aver- 
sion and positive hate. Are men likely to be con- 
ciliated by a Church which declares with one breath 
that God is the father of a race of brothers and in the 
next that " saints are his peculiar care " ? 

The Church, in its common thought and teaching 



THE CHURCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. 7 

has fatally narrowed the meaning of its great doctrine 
of salvation through Christ and through him alone. 
The Churchj believing in the divine sonship and 
boundless possibilities of humanity, sees that sonship 
and those possibilities realized in the person of Jesus 
the Christ. As the salvation of man means and can 
mean only the realization of his highest possibilities, 
the Church looks to Jesus as the pattern, the inspirer, 
and the leader. It sees that in the nature of things 
men can come near to perfection only as they come 
near to Christ. He who is nearest to the Leader 
is nearest to salvation, and all approach to him, 
whether conscious and intentional or unconscious and 
unintentional, is approach to salvation. This is sim- 
ple, natural and reasonable. It recognizes the merit 
of all effort and the value of all goodness, and at the 
same time recognizes that effort is more potent and 
goodness more valuable as they are intelligent and 
purposeful. It does not look askance at any aspira- 
tion, but rather tries to encourage all aspiration, to 
vitalize it, and to interpret it to itself. This is the 
true spirit and teaching of the Master, and they who 
harden it into a theological dogma, declare that the 
formal fellowship and blessing of the Church are 
necessary to salvation, hedge it about with mystery, 
and declare the uselessness and positive hatefulness 
of a great proportion of all human effort after higher 
things, because not nominally and professedly a follow- 
ing of Christ, commit the same mistake which was 
made by the Apostles who drew on themselves the 
merited rebuke of Jesus for forbidding the man who 
cast out devils in the Master's name but did not for- 



8 THE CHURCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. 

mally enroll himself among the Master's disciples. 
One of the worst misfortunes the Church has ever 
suffered at the hands of her over-zealous children has 
been the hardening and narrowing of the great truth 
of salvation by and through the splendid manhood of 
Christ into the shibboleth of ecclesiastical fellow- 
ship. 

With this has come, almost inevitably, a sad nar- 
rowing of the meaning of faith. Faith has been con- 
founded with holding of opinion, and belief in Christ 
with acceptance of certain opinions about him. By 
this «a load of requirement has been laid upon the 
seeker after higher life and after Christ which the 
Master and his Apostles neither used nor contemplated. 
The spirit of ecclesiastical dogmatism, with its rigid 
requirement of intellectual conformity, has stood with 
its flaming sword at the gate of the kingdom of heaven 
as the angel stood at the gate of paradise. Any man 
who seeks the betterment of human character and the 
uplifting of the human race, who works in hope and 
love for humanity, ought to be made to feel that our 
work and his work are one, and that the Church hails 
him as a fellow-laborer in God's cause without stopping 
to inquire into his intellectual opinions. St. Paul, 
with his disregard of the most cherished traditions 
and usages of Judaism, a disregard which at times 
seemed almost recklessly iconoclastic, must have 
seemed to the great body of Jerusalem Christians as 
far from orthodox as the Agnostic or Secularist of 
to-day does to the conservative Evangelical, but his 
faith in Christ was recognized, and his fellowship in 
the Church was accepted in spite of differences in 



THE CHURCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. y 

opinion and in spite of narrow-minded protests. 
When men are trying to make humanity wiser and 
better, recognizing all the while the matchless splen- 
dor of the manhood that is in Christ, is it wise to cut 
ourselves off from them and them from us because 
they are not quite able to agree with us in opinion as 
to the precise relations of the human and the divine 
in his nature, as to the exact nature and method of 
that change wrought by him in the relations between 
the human children and the divine Father which we 
call the atonement, as to the integrity of the record 
of him, or as to the existence and character of the 
life beyond? When men say "I would gladly work 
with you but I do not see my way clear to agreement 
with all your doctrines," ought we not to say, "In 
God's name, come "? On the other hand, it is neither 
wise nor truly liberal for a Liberal in theology to as- 
sume an attitude of contempt and aversion for those 
more able to accept traditional views than himself. 
One in purpose, and really one in faith, we should 
not be divided by opinion. We should rather work 
together in loving forbearance, striving the while to 
help each other in labor, strengthen each other in 
courage and enlarge each other in faith. 

The Church has unnecessarily and unwisely nar- 
rowed the grounds of its appeal to men. It has pre- 
sented itself too much as an ark of personal safety in 
the deluge of divine wrath, and not enough as the 
salt of the earth. It has urged men to seek its em- 
brace for the salvation of their own endangered souls 
rather than to seek its aid and support in the grand 
effort to bring an imperfect race up to the level of its 



10 THE CHURCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. 

possibilities. It is not easy to convince even a sinner 
of tlie need that the Church, its ministers, or even its 
Head, should interfere to save him from the wrath to 
come, nor have you aroused the best that is in him if 
you do so convince him. The better a man is the 
more difficult becomes the work of persuasion. It is 
not easy to convince a moral man, a man of upright 
and honorable life and walk, that he is so burdened 
by an inheritance of sin, or so offensive in the sight 
of a just and loving God, that he needs the Church, 
or anything that the Church can do for him, to save 
his soul from the awful experience of the divine wrath. 
Your theology may prove to logical demonstration that 
he has such need, but when you present your proofs 
he will probably laugh in your face and go his way 
undisturbed. But if you turn from this presentation 
of the case to the other, and show him the Church as 
the salt of the earth, your appeal is stronger. The 
ideal of a higher manhood will draw where fear is 
powerless to move. Some of the very men who turn 
most contemptuously to-day from the Church as hav- 
ing nothing that they need are deeply interested in 
all the problems that human advancement presents. 
They seek purer life, higher thought, nobler purpose, 
wider outlook, deeper insight, all the things which 
help and uplift. Show them that the Church is not 
a spiritual aristocracy nor a mutual admiration soci- 
ety, but a vast organization for bringing in just these 
things upon the earth, and make it so, and it will be 
very soon seen that they will find more for them- 
selves in the Church than they had thought of. It is 
good to say, " Come with us and we will do thee good,'- 



THE CHURCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. 11 

but it is better to say, " Follow me, and I will make 
you fishers of men." 

The Church again has allowed its ministration to 
be narrowed to one side of life, and that a side whose 
needs are not always the first to be realized. It is 
true that the Church has to do most directly with the 
inward and spiritual in humanity. It is also true 
that the whole of life is the manifestation of the 
spirit. The spiritual life of man ought to manifest 
itself in every possible human relation; indeed, does 
so manifest itself, whether we know it or not. But 
these multifarious relations and activities are not 
generally recognized as the manifestations of spiritual 
life. The spirit is very commonly supposed to mani- 
fest itself only in worship and in those things which 
have to do with worship. The Church, therefore, 
has come to be confounded with the public services of 
the sanctuary and the private devotions of the home. 
The very word Church brings to most minds the idea 
not of a great saving and regenerating force in human 
society, but of a certain place and certain forms and 
ceremonies observed there. Worship, and worship 
alone, is regarded as the business of the Church, and 
with that alone it is supposed rightfully to concern 
itself. To those who do not feel strictly spiritual 
needs, or whose spiritual life does not naturally mani- 
fest itself in formal worship, the Church appears to 
have no message, and the appearance is only too much 
the result of its own attitude. Just here lies the 
principal reason why women are so much more at- 
tracted to the Church than men. They are more 
keenly sensitive to impressions and experiences on 



12 THE CHUKCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. 

the spiritual side than men, and their spiritual life 
manifests itself more naturally in the channels of 
formal worship. The Church has only too much 
encouraged men to feel that the things amid which 
they pass their lives, the so-called secular things, 
are outside its scope. Men feel, naturally and rightly, 
that these things are real and important. They do 
not always feel, and the Church does not properly 
help them to feel, that they are also proper fields for 
the Church's activity and proper channels for the 
influence of the spiritual power of Christianity upon 
the life of the world. The fact is that there is no 
part of a man's life, no sphere in his activity, no side 
of his complex nature which should not be touched 
and vitalized and ennobled by the Church. We have 
insisted for nineteen centuries that Christianity is a 
world-religion, having a message for every part of the 
human race. Is it not time that we began to insist 
in a real and practical way that it has its message for 
every part of man as well? 

It is very largely because of these assumptions and 
these unnecessarily self-imposed limitations that we 
are brought face to face, in this splendid nineteenth 
century, with the astounding spectacle of an age 
abounding with the loftiest aspirations and the no- 
blest ideals, turning away dissatisfied from what is, 
potentially at least, the best and strongest agency for 
the fulfilment of those aspirations and the realization 
of those ideals. The Church has offered the bread of 
life to men when they were not hungry. It has al- 
lowed it to appear that its business was the supplying 
of needs which men did not feel, while neglecting to 



THE CHURCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. 13 

insist upon its power to supply ttie needs which they 
did feel. It has been impatient with them because 
they did not desire what it thought they ought to 
desire, and has not always been discriminating enough 
to see the propriety of the things they really did de- 
sire. This unfortunate attitude, coupled with a cer- 
tain dogmatism and tendency to make invidious 
assumption, has resulted in the indifference of many 
and the open opposition of some. It is not really 
wonderful that the leadership of the Church has been 
challenged or denied, and that it has been classed with 
feudalism and the divine right of kings as one of the 
obsolescent institutions of an earlier age. It is not 
by any means to be understood that all the error and 
all the short-sightedness have been on the side of the 
Church. There is no doubt that men have been and 
are hasty and blind and unjust ; but the Church is, 
or ought to be, the leader and teacher. It ought to 
be wiser and stronger and more just than can reasona- 
bly be expected of those whom it is trying to teach. 
Its mistakes should be unsparingly searched out and 
rigorously corrected, theirs noted only for kindly and 
loving treatment. 

It is time to preach a Christianity unburdened by 
these assumptions and untrammelled by these limita- 
tions. Without going over the ground in detail again 
to show how each should be thrown off, let the point 
be made at once that the Church must assert itself as 
having to do with every part and every activity of 
human life. It must not allow itself to be confounded 
with that ministry of public worship which is only 
one of its means, but must insist on its universality. 



14 THE CHURCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. 

It must take hold on every side of life. It must show 
its interest and its helpfulness in all human concerns. 
It must prove by its works its right to leadership in 
all human activities. The business of the Church is 
not simply to cultivate one set of powers, nor to 
strengthen one side of life, it is to strengthen all 
powers and to uplift all life. The Church has no 
right to recognize any distinction of things sacred in 
which it is supreme and things secular with which it 
has no business. That distinction is a device of those 
enemies who would rob it of both work and heritage. 
If man is a divine being, son of God, made in his 
likeness, then everything that has to do with man 
shares the divine contact, and everything that man 
does ought to be infused with the divine spirit. The 
pagan poet made one of his characters say, "I am 
human, therefore nothing human is alien to me." The 
Church ought to say, " Humanity is divine, therefore 
nothing human is alien to me." 

The word Church occurs only three times in the 
four Gospels, and two of these are in one verse. 
Christ came to found a Church, and he himself said 
that he would found one, but he generally used a 
different term to describe the institution of his found- 
ing. He called it the kingdom of God, or the kingdom 
of heaven. He had a great deal to say about the 
social relations of man to man, but very little to say 
about religious relations except as between man and 
God. He had much to say about private prayer, much 
about public duty, much about life and conduct, little 
or nothing about public worship. It is perfectly 
clear that what he looked forward to was not a splen- 



THE CHURCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. 15 

did ecclesiastical institution, nor an elaborate organi- 
zation for public worship, but a renewed and ennobled 
manhood manifesting itself in a renewed and ennobled 
society. It was to be a kingdom of God because it 
was to be a social condition where the spirit of God 
should govern all hearts and direct all actions. The 
early churches, though entirely submissive to the 
political powers that were and in no sense anarchistic 
or revolutionary, partook more of the character of 
communities than of what we are now in the habit of 
calling churches. Their business was the cultivating 
of life on the basis of the manhood of Christ, rather 
than the teaching of doctrine. Their first officers 
were administrative rather than religious or educa- 
tional. Their funds were for charitable and merciful 
objects rather than for providing the means for wor- 
ship. Worship was prominent and general. Wor- 
ship was the foundation of all and the cement by 
which all was bound together. Worship was the 
means by which men gained and retained that spirit- 
ual life which manifested itself in higher and better 
and purer social relations. It was central, but not 
inclusive. 

The present aims and ideals of the Church ought to 
be similar. It is the business of the Church to lead, 
inspire and direct all those movements which uplift 
humanity, which make the kingdoms of this earth 
the kingdom of God and his Christ. Everything 
human ought to interest it. Every good thing ought 
to feel its quickening power. Its aim is, and ought 
to be recognized as being, the improvement of all 
character and the betterment of all human relations. 



16 THE CHURCH AND THE LIFE OP MEN. 

It exists only for tlie purpose of making men and 
women better in the most rational, as well as the 
most comprehensive sense of the word. Its work is 
to be done by showing the divine relations of all 
human activities, by bringing out the divine powers 
of human souls, and by giving these powers direction 
and inspiration. In this work the ministry of wor- 
ship must always hold an important place, but it 
must be remembered what that place is. Certainly ' 
we cannot overestimate the importance of worship. 
It was only by frequent seasons of prolonged and ear- 
nest prayer that Christ kept his strength up to the 
level of his work. It was only by his constant wor- 
ship that he kept fresh that sense of nearness to God 
and of refreshment from his omnipotence that carried 
him through from day to day. But he did these 
things not simply that he might keep near to God, 
not simply that he might keep himself refreshed, 
not simply that he might keep heart strong and head 
clear, but that he might use nearness to God, refresh- 
ment of spirit, stoutness of heart, and clearness of 
head for the service of his fellow-men. All these 
things were the bases and the supports of his labors 
for the betterment of human life in all its relations. 
We need the same things, and we need them for the 
same ends. 

The Church has a mission wider than even its most 
devoted children have commonly understood, and has 
more to offer for the needs of men than has been 
commonly comprehended. For every need, for every 
hope, for every aspiration of humanity, it has some- 
thing to offer. To every man, in every place, under 



THE CHURCH AND THE LIFE OF MEN. 17 

every condition, it lias a message. All the activities 
and all the movements of our busy and complex life 
need its control, not as a ruler from without, but as 
an inspirer from within. It is the marked character- 
istic of Christianity that it places the motive power of 
all life within. " The kingdom of heaven is within 
you," said the Master. Eeligion in the heart rules 
the life without the visible interposition of law. So 
the Church, having the ultimate seat of its power in 
human hearts, should rule the world and guide all 
human and social activities, not by the external sway 
of ecclesiastical laws, but by the kingdom of God 
within. 



II. 

THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 



If we are to attempt to follow out tlie lines of 
thought indicated in the first lecture of this course 
and trace the relations of the Church to certain im- 
portant departments of human activity, it is obvious 
that the discussion must take a wide range. It will 
be necessary that a number of large questions should 
be passed in review and that our attention should be 
directed to the real nature, bearing and scope of those 
questions before we can see just the relation which the 
Church, or Christianity, has to them and the part it is 
to bear in their settlement. The present question, for 
instance, that of the relation between the Church and 
education, is not the comparatively simple question 
as to what the Church can do in the way of founding, 
fostering and encouraging education. It is the very 
much broader question of education generally, its pur- 
poses and how those purposes may best be realized. 
The effort is not to discuss the question from the stand- 
point of a partisan, but to survey it broadly, point out 
its leading features, and show the relation which they 

18 



THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 19 

bear to the general work of the Church and where and 
how the Church may properly labor for the final set- 
tlement of vexed questions. Matters of detail, of 
course, cannot be treated to any extent. No general 
treatment of the question can venture to say how par- 
ticular problems can be worked out in particular locali- 
ties. Principles may, however, be developed which 
will be suggestive and helpful. 

Indeed, it is just in respect of its ability or inability 
to be helpful in these regards that the Church is on 
trial to-day. Our Lord and his apostles clearly taught 
the sufficiency of Christianity for man, and they taught 
its sufficiency for man here and now as well as else- 
where and hereafter. Nobody, of course, supposes 
that the Lord's Prayer was intended to be the only 
petition which men were to utter, and yet it is clear 
that it was intended to give men a broad and inclusive 
idea of the nature of the things which they were to 
ask of God. Its very evident intention is to guide the 
religious aspirations of men rather than to prescribe 
a set form of petition. If you will think for a moment 
of that prayer you will see that there is not one word 
in it which has bearing on any life but this present 
one. All the things which it contemplates are things 
which are to take effect here and now, and its first 
and central thought is that God's kingdom may come 
on earth as it has come in heaven. It contemplates 
present needs, present blessings, present righteousness. 
But the Church has acquiesced altogether too quietly 
in a limitation of its sufficiency to the hereafter and 
has neither claimed nor been allowed a sufficiency for 
the present. Contrary to the thought of its founder^ 



20 THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 

it has allowed the pressing problems of so-called 
secular life to be withdrawn from its purview, and its 
ministers have not infrequently been rebuffed as pre- 
sumptuous meddlers when they have attempted to 
assert the Church's true position. But lately there 
has arisen a deep dissatisfaction with this state of 
things. Men both inside and outside the Church have 
been feeling more and more that the Church is not 
doing its full duty or taking its full place. The 
attempt to make the Christian Church a great social 
force has resulted in a reaching out into new fields of 
action. This reaching out has been largely experi- 
mental and not always wise. The fundamental thought 
on which the effort has been based is sound and true. 
The unwisdom has come from a failure to grasp firmly 
the real principles at stake. This effort is manifesting 
itself largely in what has come to be known as the 
" institutional Church/' the Church, that is, which car- 
ries on in connection with its more conventional work 
various educational and philanthropic enterprises, lit- 
erary classes, manual training-classes, amusement halls 
for the poor, gymnasiums, soup kitchens, poor relief 
and visitation, and the thousand and one things which 
seem to be needed in our larger centres of population. 
There is no doubt that the institutional Churches do 
a vast amount of good. There is room for some doubt 
whether they do not, sometimes at least, lessen the 
amount of possible Church influence by doing them- 
selves that which they should rather inspire others to 
do. The influence of the Church ought to be potent, 
for instance, in the field of education, but it is much to 
be questioned whether that means that the Church as 



THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 21 

an institution, or any individual congregation, should 
enter the field as an educator. It is very much open 
to question whether it is wise for the Church to 
attempt to do the work already provided for by the 
public school, university extension, the Chautauqua 
circle, or similar agencies. The multiplication of facili- 
ties both for primary and secondary education is one 
of the most striking phenomena of the age. Our 
public school system is constantly becoming more 
and more elaborate. The needs of those too poor to 
spare the time and money ordinarily required for even 
public school education are being met by free text- 
books and free evening schools. Everything is pro- 
vided in the freest way from the kindergarten to the 
university. Manual training-schools, cooking-schools 
and sewing-schools are becoming more and more com- 
mon. In the centres of population there is abundant 
provision for primary education, both literary and 
manual, and that provision is constantly spreading to 
smaller communities. In the way of secondary edu- 
cation there is, of course, always room for effort. 
There is always ample space for profitable work in 
the study of special subjects, but even this field is 
being constantly more and more occupied by organ- 
izations of one sort and another. But the problem of 
popular education as a social problem has to do almost 
entirely with primary education. It is not a question 
of how those who have taste and opportunity, or who 
can be encouraged to cultivate taste and find oppor- 
tunity, shall receive the advantages of a somewhat 
advanced culture, but of how the great mass of the 
boys and girls of che people can be given that amount 



22 THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 

of education which they need for dealing with the 
conditions of modern civilization and which seems 
indispensable to the permanence and efficiency of 
that civilization. 

It is true that there are many communities where 
the appliances for even that education are as yet 
scanty and imperfect. There are still communities 
where the failure to adopt the free text-book system, 
or the absence of evening schools, practically closes 
the public schools to the children of the poor, the 
very ones who most need their advantages. There 
are still more communities where no provision is 
made for industrial education or training in the 
domestic economies. Where there are such real 
educational needs not otherwise provided for, the 
Church may properly lend a direct helping hand, 
otherwise it would be wiser to act as the vitalizer and 
inspirer of existing agencies. The underlying diffi- 
culty from which come most of the mistakes made in 
this direction is the old misconception of the Church 
as an institution for worship merely. That is still 
supposed to be practically the only purpose of the 
Church, and these other things are taken on as a sort 
of bait. We have not risen to the idea that educa- 
tion and charity and all these other things which help 
humanity and elevate character are in and of them- 
selves proper Christian work, real divine ministries. 
We regard them too often as means by which the 
attention of the people may be caught and held till 
the claims of the institution for public worship can 
be enforced upon them, and they can be induced to 
form the habit of going to church. The proposition 



THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 23 

is made, for example, that a Chautauqua circle be 
organized in connection with a given church, or a 
class in book-keeping started, or a school for elemen- 
tary carpentry opened for boys, or a free cooking- 
school maintained. If these things are done to meet 
the real educational needs of the community there 
can be no doubt of their wisdom and desirability. If 
they are done, as is too often the case, without much 
regard to existing educational needs and facilities, 
but simply as a means of catching a few new boys 
and girls for the Sunday-school or a few new sitters 
for the morning service, there seems to be room for 
considerable question as to both wisdom and desira- 
bility. Some painful experiences with Chinese laun- 
drymen and other hireling converts would seem to 
discredit the system of hiring people to form some 
nominal connection with Christian churches, even if 
the bribe offered be the refined one of a bit of desira- 
ble education. There is nothing more important than 
the convincing of the unchurched that the Church is 
their true and trusty friend, but there are other and 
wiser ways of doing it. The Church can never 
Christianize education by using the schoolroom as a 
trap to catch converts. Of course it is an excellent 
thing for any person to form the habit of church- 
going, but if we allow that specific thing, as the end 
and aim of effort, to efface from our minds the larger 
considerations of growth, we shall be constantly 
making mistakes and exhausting our strength in in- 
cursions into fields where we are neither needed nor 
wanted. We have a broad and deep interest in all 
the things which make for the progress of humanity. 



24 THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 

It is highly important that we get just ideas as to 
what exactly that interest is, and how it may best 
be met. 

The idea of progress has come in these days to be 
almost synonymous in many minds with education. 
Man is a rational, though not always a reasoning, 
being, and the power that is to raise him must be 
brought to bear upon him through the development 
and application of his reasoning powers. Indeed, if 
we trace our English speech back to its sources we 
shall find that the words which denote knowledge 
and power at last run together. The man of power, 
the man who can, is the man who knows, and that is 
as true in the roughest age as it is in the most enlight- 
ened. It may be that his knowledge is of the deepest 
secrets of nature, it may be that it is of the even 
more mysterious movements of the human mind, or 
it may be that it is simply of the setting of squadrons 
in the field or the use of the weapons of war and the 
chase, but in any case it is everlastingly true, in the 
nature of things, that "knowledge is power." Cer- 
tainly it is not necessary here to sing the praises of 
education or to dilate upon it as the great instrument 
of human progress. Nor is it necessary to do more 
than to remind you that this progress which comes 
through education is not a merely material progress. 
It is a moral and spiritual progress as well. The 
best-educated nations are the most moral nations. 
Statistics show that with the decrease of illiteracy 
comes the decrease of crime, and that though some of 
the worst crimes are committed by educated persons, 
by far the greater number of crimes are committed 



THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 25 

by the uneducated. There has been, from causes not 
necessary for specification here, though by no means 
difficult to point out, a frightful increase of crime in 
this country during three or four generations, but it 
still remains true that the illiterates furnish a per- 
centage of criminals far out of proportion to their 
percentage of the entire population. In spite of many 
discouraging facts it cannot be questioned that, even 
as now conducted, education is a great factor in 
bringing men to a clearer conception and a fuller 
performance of their moral duties. 

But in spite of all this the matter of education is 
one beset with serious problems. Some recent devel- 
opments in Germany, where in some directions edu- 
cation has been carried to a point not elsewhere 
reached, have raised the question whether there is 
not danger of educating too much. There is a vast 
body of highly educated men in Germany to-day who 
are actually in distress from lack of opportunity to 
earn a living. All the learned professions are enor- 
mously overcrowded, and the German cities present 
the curious and remarkable spectacle of a learned pro- 
letariat. Much of the social disturbance in Germany 
comes from the restlessness and dissatisfaction of 
these men, who think that there must be something 
radically wrong in a State where a university -bred man 
cannot earn a living, and suppose that that wrong is 
to be righted by a readjustment from the foundation 
of all social conditions. In our own country the cry 
of alarm is already being raised that popular educa- 
tion is unfitting American boys for many kinds of 
necessary work. The public school graduate wants 



26 THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 

to be a clerk or a teacher or a newspaper man or to 
occupy some position of comparative ease and ele- 
gance, some place where he can use and display his 
learning. He is not willing to be a farmer or to 
engage in manual labor unless of some special kind 
that commands large remuneration. The positions 
which he disdains are filled by the young immigrant, 
and the native finds himself crowded out. If educa- 
tion is as potent for good as we have supposed it to 
be, how comes it that a very high degree of education 
is producing such evil results? 

The question may be answered, as so many others 
may be, by a reference to fundamental principles. 
The difficulty comes from a failure to appreciate ex- 
actly the purpose of education, and from a tendency 
to regard the education itself as a finality instead of 
the means to the accomplishment of a purpose. The 
German has mistaken training for education. He has 
taken his youth and trained them, not broadly but 
very deeply, in some specialty. He has not fitted 
them for life ; he has simply fitted them for a profes- 
sion, and if that profession is overcrowded there is no 
place for them anywhere. The American has filled 
his boy's head with facts, but he has not really edu- 
cated even that part of him and only too often has 
done nothing for his hands or his heart. It is very 
easy for the enthusiastic educator to make the mis- 
take of supposing that education in itself is the most 
desirable thing for a man. It is exactly the same 
mistake which the enthusiastic religionist makes when 
he allows himself to think that Church membership 
and attendance upon public worship are in them- 



THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 27 

selves the most desirable possible things. Filling a 
man to the brim with facts is not a thing particu- 
larly desirable in itself. If that were all of educa- 
tion we could very easily have too much of it. It 
is only as the acquisition of facts subserves certain 
important purposes that it becomes valuable. And 
these purposes are a great deal more important than 
the production of a more efficient social unit or the 
development of a more perfect machine for producing 
wealth. The enthusiast for education for itself is 
now hard pressed by the specializer. The German 
idea of training a man for that special thing which he 
is to do, and leaving aside as useless lumber every- 
thing else, takes strong hold upon the practical Ameri- 
can mind. The specializer has a very clear idea of 
what he wants, and finds no difficulty in giving his 
idea perfectly intelligible expression. Education has 
a purpose, certainly; but what should that purpose 
be save to enable me to do some one thing supremely 
well, and become a sort of excellent tool in the great 
machine-shop of life? The world has too many ped- 
ants and too many machines already. What it needs 
is men. The sole proper business of education is to 
produce men. Its sole justification, the only reason 
for the vast outlay of time, thought and public money 
upon it, is its capacity to produce men, and the de- 
gree to which that capacity is realized. The educated 
man ought to be, and the statistics show that, taken 
by and large, he is, better for his education. He is 
better in all the relations of life. His education has 
wrought improvement in character,- and that is its 
sole result that has any real value. 



28 THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 

But here we raise certain other questions which, 
as it happens, very deeply concern us Americans at 
the present day. It has just been said that the edu- 
cated man is better in all the relations of life. Most 
conspicuously he is a better citizen. Indeed, to be 
exact, only a man of some education can be a citizen 
at all. The citizen, speaking strictly, takes some 
part, though perhaps a very slight one, in the govern- 
ment of the land of his residence. Citizenship reaches 
its fullest development in the democratic republic. 
But it is abundantly demonstrated by the experience 
of the world that it takes a comparatively high aver- 
age of education and character in the citizen to make 
a successful democratic republic possible. The lower- 
ing standard of intelligence, in certain districts at 
least, in our own country, has given not a little anx- 
iety to many of our most patriotic citizens, and has 
led to serious question as to the necessity of some 
modification of our institutions to counteract its 
effects. The ignorant savage can only be governed 
by a patriarchal despotism. To speak of citizenship 
in connection with him is absurd. There can only be 
chief and subjects. As education advances the possi- 
bilities of citizenship and the desirability of wider 
popular participation in the government increase, till 
we arrive at the condition which demands and guaran- 
tees republican institutions. That an intelligent, as 
well as a moral, citizenship is the indispensable basis 
of free institutions is a proposition hardly open to 
discussion. Therefore, the right of educating the 
future citizen to the degree necessary for fair per- 
formance of the duties of citizenship, which the State 



THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 29 

possesses inalienably as tlie guardian and conserver of 
the interests of the people, becomes a positive duty. 
Self-preservation and the highest necessity, as well as 
the dearest interests of the people, demand that the 
State shall insist and provide that the youth be univer- 
sally educated. If this duty is so neglected or left 
to the caprice or selfishness of the individual that the 
cause of education suffers, that intelligence which is 
the basis of free institutions is undermined and de- 
stroyed. The ignorant multitude can no longer be 
safely entrusted with the ballot. Incapable of judg- 
ing even as to its own interests, it yields easily to cor- 
ruption, and becomes the ready victim of designing 
demagogues. Unwise legislation, widespread corrup- 
tion, commercial and political disaster, follow each 
other in rapid succession, till the heroic remedy of 
the absolute rule of " the man on horseback " becomes 
the last and only resource. The State needs that the 
people be educated for citizenship. It must see to it 
that they are so educated. The public interests here 
involved are so great that no private interest or per- 
sonal caprice should be allowed to stand in their way. 
It is maintained very strenuously by certain advocates 
of large individual freedom of action, that no power 
on earth has the right to interfere between parent and 
child, and that the direction and extent of the child's 
education ought to be left solely in the hands of the 
parent. Personal liberty reaches its limit when it 
becomes dangerous to the community. In the long 
run few things can be more dangerous to a modern 
community than the ignorance of its members, and 
the community is fully justified in any limitation of 



30 THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 

personal liberty needed to prevent sucli ignorance. 
Compulsory sanitation is recognized and enforced as 
necessary all over the civilized world, but ignorance 
is more dangerous to the real welfare of a community 
than small-pox or cholera. The State has no right, 
be it remembered, to limit education. Its right and 
duty are to insist upon sufficiency and soundness, and 
the parent or the individual retain the right to make 
whatever additions they may desire. 

But the interests at stake are not only such as to 
command the patronage of the State and justify the 
pouring out of the public funds like water, they are 
such as to command the interest of the Church as 
well. It is quite possible that the forms of an elabo- 
rate religious cult may be imposed on a very ignorant 
and debased humanity, and it is even possible that 
such a humanity may be made exceedingly obedient 
to all the commands of a priesthood. Buf it is being 
recognized more and more that the most scrupulous 
attention to the details of the cult and the most un- 
bounded subserviency to the hierarchy are not in- 
consistent with the lowest morality and the most 
rudimentary character. We are beginning to see that 
religion is neither the cult nor the Church, but the 
relations of the individual soul to its God and its 
neighbors, the children, and in some sense the repre- 
sentatives, of its God. In order that these relations 
may be right, they must be intelligently conceived and 
intelligently sustained. It is only as man becomes 
educated that he is enabled to comprehend large ideas, 
take wide outlooks, and understand the real meaning 
and scope of duty. The better educated men are the 



THE CHUECH AND EDUCATION. 31 

larger become the possibilities of a broad and helpful 
religious life. The real interests of religion, as well 
as those of the State, depend upon the prevalence of 
an education that shall really educate, that is, that 
shall have in view the improvement of character and 
shall draw out and energize those powers and faculties 
which serve that end. 

Here arises a very serious question. The Church 
and the State are equally interested in the education 
of the people. Each feels also that it is especially 
interested in prescribing the bent of that education. 
Which shall do the educating? The friends of State 
education plead the right and duty already pointed 
out. They plead that this great matter of public in- 
terest should be kept within the reach of all, and pro- 
vided for at the public charge. They claim that it is 
neither wise, just, nor desirable to remit the important 
business of education to any private or semi-private 
hands. They claim that there is no justification for 
the expenditure of public money on education unless 
that education shall carefully prepare the young for 
citizenship, a result secure only as long as State con- 
trol is maintained. 

Against this position certain strong objections are 
urged. It is said that a free government cannot prop- 
erly recognize any form of religion as preferable to 
any other, and that in thus avoiding discrimination 
between the forms of religion it is inevitable that 
education should lose the religious and moral element 
entirely, and when it loses that it loses the power to 
do that work on character which is its sole justifica- 
tion. A State education, it is said, is a Godless edu- 



S2 THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 

cation. It has to do with the material side of things 
alone, and ignores the spiritual side. It leads to a 
critical, if not a scoffing, spirit, and results in a brill- 
iant atheism and a cultured and unscrupulous selfish- 
ness. Such an education is worse than none. The 
Church, therefore, it is said, should do the educating, 
in order that these evil results may be avoided. The 
State may indeed very properly pay the bills as com- 
pensation for the benefits it is to receive, but the 
administration of education should be in the hands of 
the Church, and the teaching should be done by its 
accredited agents and members. Religion is the chief 
concern of men, and the Church, as the guardian and 
teacher of religion, should see to it that the education 
of men is a religious education. We in New England 
are familiar with this position as being that of a 
large portion of the members of the Roman Catholic 
Church. 

We must not, however, make the mistake of sup- 
posing that this is simply a question between Catholic 
and Protestant. The doctrine of Church education 
finds some of its most strenuous supporters among 
Protestants. We need only to be reminded of the 
educational work of the German Lutherans in some 
of our Western States, of the schools supported by the 
Established Church in England, and of other similar 
institutions. 

But it does not yet appear that Church control of 
education necessarily makes it in any proper sense of 
the term more religious. It is inevitable that educa- 
tion administered by the Church should be education 
administered by sects, and it is equally inevitable 



THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 33 

that the special interest of the sect should be the first 
thing to receive consideration. Education adminis- 
tered by sects inevitably tends directly to the inflaming 
and increasing of the differences and prejudices which 
divide men, and which stand in the way of real prog- 
ress and real religion. It is hardly possible that the 
special views and tenets of the sect should not be made 
prominent, and such prominence necessarily makes 
conspicuous the things which distinguish and divide. 
The more conspicuous we make our differences the 
more widely we are likely to be divided by them. 
A divided Church is a crippled Church. A divided 
humanity is kept back in its progress by as much as 
it is divided. The true interests of religion are not 
and cannot be subserved by pitiless insistence on the 
distinctions of creeds. Moreover, the ecclesiastic is 
not a good educator. He is timid in investigation, 
hampered by tradition, partial in view. He is always 
in danger of being more loyal to creed than to truth, 
while the first and most important qualification of the 
educator is absolute loyalty to truth. There is no 
question that ecclesiastical education produces better 
churchmen than any other. It may be very seriously 
questioned, however, whether it produces any better 
men. It would be difficult to show that, denomina- 
tional loyalty aside, the morals of the ecclesiastically 
educated are any better than those of the pupils of 
the State schools, or their ideas of duty any more 
sound and true. It happens also not infrequently 
that ecclesiastical education substitutes loyalty to jhe 
prelate for loyalty to the magistrate, denominational- 
ism for patriotism, ecclesiasticism for public spirit. 



34 THE CHURCH AKD EDUCATION. 

Such sweeping charges as these against a widely 
accepted theory of education ought not to be made 
without some show of evidence. There are some very 
conspicuous instances of the great excellence of pri- 
vate schools, but the general inferiority of the educa- 
tion given by private schools of every kind is matter 
of common knowledge, and is not infrequently ad- 
mitted even by those who consider that they possess 
other advantages which compensate fully for their 
weakness here. The failure of the graduates of such 
schools to compete with those of the public schools in 
examinations for entrance to high schools shows that 
there is a vast difference in the training given. Only 
a few years ago the managers of a denominational 
school in one of the Massachusetts cities where the 
system of admission to the high school by certificate 
from the grammar school prevails, appeared before the 
school board, showed that their course of study was 
the same as that of the public grammar schools, and 
asked that their pupils be admitted to the high school 
on their certificate of graduation. The board refused, 
but offered to admit them on their passage of the 
graduation examinations used that year in the public 
grammar schools. A class of perhaps fifteen took the 
examinations, and not one passed by the percentage 
required of the grammar school pupils. Monsignor 
Satolli, the papal legate, finds the condition of the 
schools maintained by his denomination such as to 
call for a most earnest recommendation to the parish 
priests to use every effort to make their schools fully 
equal to the public schools, and to justify his dis- 
couraging special effort to induce the people to make 



THE CHtTRCH AND EDUCATION. 36 

use of the denominational schools, important as he 
considers it that they should make use of them, unless 
such equality shall have been fully established. A 
powerful article by Prof. James B. Mackenzie, in a 
recent number of the " School Eeview," makes a strong 
plea for the authoritative public supervision of all 
private schools (and it must be remembered that a 
very large proportion of the private schools of the 
country are under ecclesiastical management of some 
sort or another), and supports the position taken by a 
strong array of facts and figures. He mentions one 
case where a well-known fitting school graduated a 
class of twenty -five members, not one of whom suc- 
ceeded in passing the entrance examination of one of 
our lower grade colleges. There is no lack of the 
strongest evidence that on the intellectual side private 
education is inferior to public education from top to 
bottom, a few conspicuous instances to the contrary 
excepted. 

On the moral side of the question we have some 
fresh and significant evidence from France. France 
is undergoing a tremendous moral and spiritual as well 
as material regeneration. Since 1882 France has had 
a public school system in many respects like our own. 
The Republic maintains free public schools, and re- 
ligious bodies maintain what are called confessional 
schools side by side with them. School attendance is 
compulsory upon all children, and the certificates that 
the legal requirements have been met are granted 
only on examination, thus compelling practical uni- 
formity of work in the two classes of schools. France 
has taken a long step forward in making obligatory in 



36 THE CHUKCH AND EDUCATION. 

all the schools of the Eepublic a distinct department 
of moral instruction. The statistics thus far availa- 
ble go to show that even better work in this line is 
done in the public than in the confessional schools. 
A single instance will indicate somewhat the kind of 
work attempted and is significant also of the results 
attained. At an examination for certificates this 
question was given for a composition: "With some 
of your friends you go to a fair ; you have no money 
in your pocket as your parents are poor; suddenly 
you find a purse with a five-franc piece in it. Tell 
what you would do with it." There were 111 candi- 
dates, 30 from secular schools, 81 from confessional 
schools. Of the 30 there were 23 who knew that to 
take the money without seeking an owner would not 
be honest. Of the 81 only 30 knew that a thing lost 
belongs to the loser, the other 51 had no hesitation in 
appropriating the money at once. It is not for an 
instant to be supposed that the confessional school in 
Erance or elsewhere deliberately distorts or even ig- 
nores the morals of the pupil. The difficulty is that 
the clergyman in charge teaches that which he has 
been himself trained to regard as the most important 
thing for the soul's welfare, and it is almost inevita- 
ble that the stress should be laid on catechisms and 
confessions of faith rather than on the practical ethics 
of every-day life ; in short, following an old and mis- 
chievous distinction, on religion rather than morals. 
There is little room for doubt that if the one hundred 
and eleven candidates had all belonged to the same 
Church, — and, by the way, there is nothing to show 
that they did not, — and some question had been asked 



THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. ST 

which related to the creed or catechism used in that 
Church the graduates of the confessional schools would 
have more than turned the tables on their more suc- 
cessful rivals. 

If we admit that the objections to ecclesiastical 
education are fatal, and to many of us the admission 
seems necessary, are we really driven to the conclu- 
sion that the Church has no business with education? 
Is an utterly godless education the only alternative? 
Is it not rather the truth that a wise conception of the 
proper ends of education will furnish a ground on 
which these conflicting claims can be harmonized and 
on which those of different sects and creeds can find 
room for united action? The aim of the Church and 
the aim of the State in this matter are really identi- 
cal. They both desire the improvement of the indi- 
vidual. They both desire that he should be made 
wiser, more humane, and more trustworthy — better 
in every relation of life. The ideal citizen would be 
the ideal Church member and the ideal Church mem- 
ber would be the ideal citizen. Each is a man who is 
exactly righteous in all his dealings with his fellow- 
men and in all his dealings with his God. A godless 
and immoral man is as bad a member of the State as 
he is of the Church. Granting unity of real aim, it 
becomes the duty of Church and State to co-operate 
in the realization of that aim, and it does not seem 
that such co-operation ought to be difficult. It is the 
business of the State to provide the appliances and 
the machinery. The State, through its appointed 
officers, should have the entire handling of the ma- 
chinery of education. It should provide school boards 



S8 THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 

and supervisors, teachers and buildings, and, to a cer- 
tain extent at least, text-books and apparatus. It 
should open the public purse wide enough to place 
these advantages within the reach of every child, and 
should stand, by its legal compulsion, between the 
children and the carelessness or cupidity of parents 
and their own ignorant impatience of school restraint. 
It should see to it also that the education given be 
sufficiently broad and sufficiently practical to fit the 
child for the responsible duties of citizenship. All 
this is the right and the duty of the State, but the 
breathing of a soul into this body is the duty of the 
Church. It is not the duty of the Church to adminis- 
ter this work; it is its duty to inspire it. This duty 
is one which has absolutely nothing whatever to do 
with creeds. It is one in which Jew and Gentile, 
Protestant and Catholic, the man of closest creed or 
the man of no creed at all, may interest themselves 
side by side. Church and State are alike interested 
in making the education of the child an education of 
the heart and soul as well as a training of the intel- 
lect. The finer feelings and higher capacities of the 
pupil are to be developed as well as his logical faculty 
and his power of observation. That this can be done 
by wise and careful instruction, without entering at 
all upon the debatable ground of denominational tenet, 
is shown by the experience of France already referred 
to. The reports from hundreds of French schools 
show that the entire morale of the scholars has been 
improved, and that there is a striking tendency toward 
the disappearance of those disagreeable and sometimes 
cruel things which so many children are given to 



THE CHUECH AND EDUCATION. 39 

doing. The parents go to the teachers and bear un- 
solicited testimony to the improvement in the habits 
and dispositions of their children. The improvement 
extends to the teachers themselves. They cannot 
teach morals without learning morals. France shows 
us what sound ideas of public morals and healthy 
appreciation of the value of such morals can do with 
State schools. The proper sphere of Christian activ- 
ity in the matter of education lies in the interpreta- 
tion, uplifting and inspiring of just such effort every- 
where, and in the creation of a public opinion that 
will both demand and support such effort. 

The Church can accomplish this work through its 
position as the teacher of the teacher and the leader 
and guide of public opinion. The Church aspires to 
be the leader of public opinion, and whenever it shows 
capacity for such leadership it is so. Men are some- 
times temporarily misled by their ignorant prejudices 
and oppositions, but in the long run the best opinion 
prevails, and they follow the lead which is best worth 
following. Let the whole Church recognize clearly 
that it has certain relations to education and certain 
duties arising from those relations, and unite in the 
pressing of certain fundamental principles, and its 
influence would soon be found potent enough to make 
education as really Godly as any enlightened Christian 
could desire. It has been assumed throughout that 
the Church should be and must be the friend of the 
widest possible popular education. Perhaps the state- 
ment ought to -be made explicitly, because there may 
be some who would shrink from its full acceptance. 
That the Church is itself a teaching organization, and 



40 THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 

that it presupposes rationality on the part of those it 
deals with, and that it does its work by the commen- 
dation of truth to human minds, are all true, and yet 
there are many who forget that the Church and the 
truth can never be antagonistic. They are not abso- 
lutely loyal to truth. They are loyal to it only so far 
as they see that it is, or foresee that it will be, con- 
sistent with certain dogmatic positions which they 
have been educated to hold. They shrink from it and 
fear it when it seems likely to lead them out into the 
dark unknown. The feeling which shut Galileo in 
the dungeons, of the Inquisition was the same as that 
which condemned Professor Briggs, and in neither 
instance was it simply an intolerant spirit of persecu- 
tion. In both instances the feeling at the bottom of 
the whole matter was fear, — fear to follow the truth, 
fear to look at the light, fear that too much truth 
would harm the Church, baseless and ridiculously 
inconsistent fear lest one part of God's truth should 
be found contradicting another part of God's truth. 
Only error can contradict the truth. The Church has 
nothing to fear from education, and nothing to hope 
from ignorance. The educating of men is part and 
parcel of the great general work of uplifting them, 
and as the leader in the general uplift the Church 
should lead and inspire all education. 

And first the Church should insist with unflinching 
emphasis that the teacher as a teacher is the minister 
of God. Let us not come short of that clear and 
positive position. It is not sufficient to affirm that 
ministers should discharge the teaching function. It 
is not enough to say that science is the handmaid of 



THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 41 

religion and the teacher the helper of the priest. We 
do not desire to set up any external relation between 
God's ministries among men and the school as prepar- 
ing the way for such ministries. We want to insist 
sharply and clearly that as education is one of the 
great means for human improvement, therefore it is 
in itself a divine ministry, and the young girl who 
sits amidst her little flock in the roughest unpainted 
country schoolhouse is as truly God's minister as the 
most illustrious prelate or preacher in the land. As 
we shall by and by see, this sense of the sanctity of 
work for humanity's good ought not to be confined to 
one line of effort. It ought to be insisted on as re- 
gards all such effort. There are many people who are 
enthusiasts in their chosen work of educating who 
suppose because they take no interest in creeds and 
rituals, or even in public worship, and because they 
see these things so often insisted on by the Church, 
that they have no part or lot with the Church. The 
Church only too often confirms their judgment. It 
ought to recognize for itself and impress upon them 
the fact that their work, in and of itself, without re- 
gard to their attitude toward these other things, pro- 
viding it is not an attitude of narrow hostility, is a 
service of God and a divine ministry to men. May 
it not be true that much which passes for infidelity 
is the product of our own arbitrary definitions? 
Once convince teachers and taught of the sanctity of 
teaching, and that the teacher's office is one to be 
undertaken solemnly and discharged faithfully, and a 
great step has been taken in the direction of the re- 
demption of education, not only from irreligion, but 



42 THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 

from presumptuous incompetence as well. The ability 
to teach is a great opportunity for divine service 
which God puts into the hands of some of his chil- 
dren, just as he entrusts to others the power to lead 
and organize, to others the gift of oratory, and to 
others the gift of art. The call of the teacher is a 
divine call to a divine ministry ; let the Church em- 
phasize the fact. What a splendid opportunity and 
what a tremendous responsibility come to the teacher ! 
Day after day the teacher is in close and commanding 
contact with these little souls in the critical plastic 
period of life. On the teacher and his faithfulness 
depend some of the most momentous issues of life. 
His calm and strong guidance into right action and 
high thought may counteract many another influence 
and bring sound manhood or sweet womanhood out 
of the most unpromising material and surroundings, 
while carelessness and indifference on his part may 
spoil the fairest prospects. Are we quite sure that 
all teachers fully realize these things? Are we sure 
that there are no teachers whose teaching is simply 
work for bread and butter, with no real consciousness 
of its far-reaching importance? There is great work 
to be done here in interpreting to teachers and to 
the public alike the high sanctity of the teaching 
office. It lies in the power of the Church to create a 
new and transforming conception of the teacher's 
place in the world, and to create a public sentiment 
that shall demand of all teachers at least a measura- 
ble realization of that conception. 

And then the Church should labor constantly to 
keep the true ideals of education before the people. 



THE CHUECH AND EDUCATION. 43 

This is not always an easy thing to do. We in this 
country have gone very extensively into the business 
of education, and have entered very generally into 
the race for it, but as a people we have not yet reached 
clear ideas as to its proper end. Sometimes we take 
it up merely as a matter of course, as something 
everybody does. Sometimes we seek it as the means 
to the gratification of some particular desire. Some- 
times we do all possible to secure it for ourselves or 
for our children on the general, but rather indefinite, 
ground that " it will be a good thing for them, " good 
for what we are not always able to state. There are 
many interests pressing for recognition, many faddish 
notions that are claiming prominence. We are be- 
tween the contending claims of fact-hunger on one 
side and over-specialization on the other. The Church 
cannot do too much to bring the people to sound views. 
The education which ruthlessly discards everything 
that is not to be directly serviceable in earning money, 
and* which asks only, " How can I use this thing when 
I get to work? " is, if anything, worse than that which 
considers anything worth ticketing and pigeon-holing 
provided only it be accounted a fact. It has already 
been said in another connection that the true end and 
aim of education is the building of character, and it 
cannot be repeated too often. You want your boy to 
be a good citizen, a good husband and father, an hon- 
est man, serving God and helping his fellows. What 
else he knows or doesn't know is of very little impor- 
tance. You want your daughter to be a true, loving, 
useful woman, faithful to home and children, faithful, 
too, to the community and to her God. Other things 



44 THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION, 

are merely incidental. The Church and the State 
both need that your boy and your girl should be and 
do just those things, and they should work together 
to see that the education that they get shall be planned 
to produce these results in the soundest way and on 
the largest scale. The Church can do much that 
greatly needs to be done to keep these ideals before 
the people, and to create a popular conception of edu- 
cation, its aims and its value, that shall not allow 
itself to be misled by any specious pleading for false 
ideals, and a popular opinion that shall insist that 
educators keep these right ideals constantly in view. 
Sometimes we think that when the minister preaches 
a sermon which, instead of dealing with the affairs of 
the other world, has regard to education or charity or 
sociology or statesmanship, he is getting out of his 
depth, and we are tempted, and sometimes yield to 
the temptation to cry, " To thy last, shoemaker ! " 
But is it not the business of the Church to point out 
the possibilities of these things, their real ends and 
aims, the purposes for which God ordained them? 
The sermon which impresses on the minds of the con- 
gregation the power of the school as the building-place 
of character, and the true aim of the school to make 
that character upright and of sterling worth, does at 
least as much good as the sermon which re-rivets the 
plates of an ironclad creed. So let the Church bear 
constant testimony, and let it not allow the truth to 
be forgotten that the end and aim of all education is 
not the filling of a man with facts, nor the increase 
of his wage-earning capacity, but the making of him 
better in all the relations of his life. 



THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 45 

These two points made, and the public mind famil- 
iarized with them, it would be comparatively easy to 
make the third and equally important point that edu- 
cation, particularly primary education, should never 
be allowed to fall into Godless hands. If the public 
mind regards teaching as a divine ministry, and if it 
regards the aim of education as the betterment of 
human character, it will never allow the administra- 
tion of education to fall under the control of those 
whose thoughts do not harmonize with such conclu- 
sions, whose aims are inconsistent with them, and 
whose lives deny them. It is not to be claimed for 
an instant that doctrinal soundness is to be made a 
test of fitness to teach. It is not claimed that the 
teacher should be a member of, or even an attendant 
upon, any Church, though those things are desirable. 
But it is claimed that the teacher should have a love 
for God, a love for men, and a love for righteousness. 
He should be pure in life and sweet in thought. He 
should have a sound moral sense, a wide charity, a 
comprehension of the aims of education, and, most 
important perhaps of all, a sense of the sacred respon- 
sibilities of his own office. It is quite possible to 
have all these things, and to impart them to others 
without the slightest trenching on the grounds of 
controversy. We are accustomed to think that the 
preacher ought to be learned, but if he makes direct 
parade of his learning in his sermons he spoils them. 
The learning must not appear on the surface of the 
sermon, and yet it must be its life-blood.- So of the 
teacher. He ought to be religious, but if he parades 
his religion he spoils his teaching. His religion must 



46 THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 

not appear on the surface of his teaching, but it 
should be its life-blood. After all, the most effective 
religious teaching is that which is rayed forth con- 
stantly from a pure and noble life, and we may be 
sure that there is no man, no matter what his views, 
who would not rather have his children under the 
daily influence of a devout and God-fearing teacher 
than under that of an utter sceptic or a confirmed 
materialist. The power of a Christian manhood in a 
teacher has been experienced again and again, but the 
true extent of its influence has never yet been meas- 
ured. Such is the influence which we most desire to 
throw around the lives of our children. "With educa- 
tion in such hands the reproach of Godlessness would 
be no longer possible, and yet, with education at the 
same time freed from direct ecclesiastical control, the 
evils of that control would be avoided. Education 
would be where it ought to be, provided by the State, 
inspired by the Church, administered by the best 
without regard to sect or creed. 

Along such lines as have been indicated lies the 
solution of the problem of Church and State in educa- 
tion. An intelligent comprehension of the true aims 
of education brings with it a realization of the iden- 
tity of the interests of Church and State. Their in- 
terests being the same, they ought never to be rivals. 
The State needs the things the Church would seek, 
and the Church the things the State would seek. 
The two should work together, the State providing 
and administering education, the Church inspiring 
and vitalizing it by presenting to the people high 
conceptions of it, by giving to the world the noblest 



THE CHURCH AND EDUCATION. 47 

ideas as to the teacher's mission and opportunity, and 
by creating a public opinion which, recognizing the 
aims of the school and the place of the teacher, shall 
demand that all shall be realized and fulfilled in a 
helpful and ennobling education. 



III. 

THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 



A DISCUSSION of the relations "betrveen the Church, 
and charity is in itself a notable sign of the times. 
That such a discussion should be started is a striking 
evidence of the change that has come about Tvithin 
comparatively recent years in the common thinking 
of men. The Church has al"ways been looked upon 
as the natural guardian of the weak, and the natural 
dispenser of the bounties of the strong. Since the 
day vrhen our Lord gave his parting injunction to his 
Apostles to feed his sheep this particular branch of 
human effort has always been held to lie very close 
to the field of strictly religious activity. But in these 
later years there is more or less of disposition to di- 
vorce even this from the Church. The entire secu- 
larization of charity has become the aim of many, and 
every effort is being made by certain thinkers to spread 
the idea that Church interference or Church activity 
in such matters are simply meddling with concerns 
whose administration properly belongs elsewhere. 
The Church is obliged not only to vindicate by argu- 

48 



THE CHUKCH AND CHAKITY. 49 

ment its right to concern itself with those things 
which have been commonly regarded as lying further 
from its province, but to contend also for continued 
recognition even here. 

We hardly need to be reminded that during the 
early history of the Christian Church and throughout 
the Middle Ages all charity was distinctly religious. 
Properly speaking, charity began with Christianity. 
No doubt there has always been private giving, but 
the vast efforts, now so familiar, to relieve distress on 
a large scale are the outgrowth of Christian thought. 
Hospitals, asylums and the other appliances of public 
and private charity were unknown to the classic 
world. The splendid charities of to-day are among 
the grandest results of the new spirit Christianity 
has brought among men. Probably no practical vir- 
tue was so strongly insisted upon by the clel'gy of the 
old days as that of almsgiving. Almsgiving was 
largely prescribed as a penance, and generally urged 
as most acceptable to God -as a religious exercise. 
The convents and monasteries had their regular dis- 
tributions of doles of food and clothing and money. 
Private giving was large, and every man of means, 
from the king to the prosperous burgher, had his 
crowds of needy dependants. Hospitals, asylums 
and other charitable foundations abounded, some few 
founded and supported by the Church, but more 
founded by private gift or bequest, and placed under 
clerical administration. This later fact is notable. 
Whatever the origin of the charity, it was almost in- 
variably administered and controlled by the clergy in 
their official capacity. The Church quietly assumed 



50 THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 

to be the proper administrator of all systematic char- 
ity, and the claim met with ready assent. From one 
point of view this claim may be fairly enough set 
down as a part of the settled policy of the mediaeval 
Church to control everything. The hand of the priest 
can be seen clearly at work everywhere during this 
entire period. Many of the most striking political 
events of the period grow out of the struggles and the 
intrigues of the clergy for political supremacy. The 
most striking sociological phenomenon is the vast 
absorption of wealth, power and all the sources of 
influence in the hands of the hierarchy. The priest- 
hood aimed at the absolute control of entire human 
life, from the treaties between states and the consti- 
tutions of kingdoms down to the humble details of the 
home life of the poorest peasant. It is a common, 
but very iiasty, conclusion that all this came from a 
mere vulgar thirst for power. The Beckets and the 
Hildebrands who stamped their personalities so deeply 
on the times are looked upon as exponents of nothing 
more than unbridled ambition clothed with well-nigh 
irresistible power. In reality they were much more 
than that. They were the champions of a great 
principle, a principle imperfectly understood and un- 
wisely applied even by its stanchest advocates, but 
at bottom sound and true. Behind all this striving 
for power lies the sound instinct that Christianity 
ought to be the central power in human life, and that 
the influence of the Church ought to be everywhere 
dominant. Undoubtedly this instinct was more or 
less distorted by pride and ambition, and more or less 
stained by many human weaknesses, but we shall 



THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 51 

never comprehend the history of the Middle Ages 
unless we take it into the account. 

The age was rude, and the people who lived in it 
were not superior to their generation. They were not 
able to see that there was any way in which the 
Church could rule, and Christianity become supreme 
in human life, unless the ministers of the Church were 
the direct administrators of every human activity, 
using other powers simply as their agents. Written 
everywhere on laws, customs, religion, all the com- 
mon thinking of the people, stands the evidence that 
they had not yet grown to comprehension of the idea 
that the really potent forces in the individual and in 
society are not those which are seated without and 
operate by compulsion, but those which reside within 
and operate from within outward. They could not 
understand the Christ-ideal of the kingdom of God, 
the social state where God should reign supreme be- 
cause the heart of every man was full of his love and 
his spirit. They only got as far as the idea of the 
"two swords. '^ Their idea of a model society was 
that of a world united under the civil control of one 
emperor and under the spiritual control of one vice- 
gerent of God. The spiritual ruler was to sit upon 
the throne; the civil ruler to stand upon its upper 
step. The civil power was to be simply the "tem- 
poral arm" of the spiritual power, controlled by its 
brain, carryitig out its behests, administering its 
authority in material things. From top to bottom 
of society the same principle was to prevail. By 
the side of every officer of the crown was to stand the 
proper officer of the Church, controlling him as the 



bZ THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 

British Resident controls the Indian Eajah, and thus 
the kingdom of God was to become an actuality. 
Probably that rough and ready way of getting at the 
matter was the only one practicable in those days. 
The old traditions still linger among many Christians 
who try in vain to adjust them to the new day. They 
are very much in earnest, and entirely in the right, 
in their desire that Christianity should rule all human 
affairs. They are not able to see how it can so rule 
unless by the recognized authority of the office-bearers 
of the Church or the political preponderance of its 
members. And so they form clerical parties, impose 
religious tests in political matters, demand ecclesi- 
astical control, temporal authority for a priesthood, 
an established Church, with its share of political 
authority, perfectly sincere in their convictions and 
perfectly sound in their fundamental ideas, but 
utterly without adequate comprehension of present 
conditions and present needs. Another part of hu- 
manity in its recoil from arbitrary and external eccle- 
siastical control has sacrificed the true and false 
together, and turned absolutely away from the idea 
of the supremacy of religion in daily life. To these 
religion has come to mean ecclesiasticism, the suprem- 
acy of the religious interest the rule of an established 
Church, and the tTiiimph of Christianity the rule of a 
priesthood. A third party, as yet small, is trying to 
interpret the real truth of the old idea, and to apply 
it to the broader and fuller life of the present age. 

It is to be noted that the charities of the olden time 
were solely religious in their basis. The idea of the 
sociological aspects of charity had not yet dawned 



THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 63 

upon the world. The giver gave because he hoped 
thereby to gain the favor of the God who loveth the 
cheerful giver, because he had been brought up to 
regard giving as most virtuous, or because he was 
humanely desirous of relieving the distress so preva- 
lent in an age of rudeness and poverty. His giving 
was very largely of that promiscuous kind which is 
now coming to be recognized as being so very mis- 
chievous. In those days, however, the great mor- 
tality, especially among children, arising from war 
and pestilence, and the other economic conditions of 
the time, prevented in large measure the realization of 
these mischievous results. The presence of a large 
class of paupers was neither feared nor deplored. It 
was accepted as natural and inevitable. Had not 
Jesus himself said, " The poor you have always with 
you "? The idea that that was simply a statement of 
prevailing conditions and not the inspired declaration 
of what ought to be and always would be, would 
probably have been denounced as heresy if anybody 
had been keen enough to see it or bold enough to de- 
clare it. But now men have begun to feel the impulse 
of different thought. They have begun to ask whether 
poverty is not preventable. They have begun to look 
at the question of poverty more broadly, and to see 
that charity ought to have for its object something 
higher than a mere personal laying-up of treasure in 
heaven, a formal compliance with the demands of the 
Church, or a mere sentimental impulse to relieve 
visible, distressing want. . They have begun to see 
that the need of the poor man or the poor class is not 
one that can be met by a mere dole of food or money. 



54 THE CHUECH AND CHARITY. 

They have begun to realize that charity is sociological 
as well as religious, and that its true aim must be the 
final abolition of poverty. The larger interests of the 
class and the community must be considered, rather 
than the immediate personal desires of the sufferer. 
Charity must be undertaken systematically and on a 
large scale. It must be constant and patient. It 
must interest itself in the individual as a brother 
rather than as a "case." It must have its eye con- 
stantly on the conditions, moral, spiritual and social 
as well as merely physical, which give rise to distress 
and to which distress gives rise. 

The charity of to-day is discovering that its busi- 
ness after all is with the man himself, and not with 
the contents of his stomach or the covering of his 
back. It may well take for its motto the words of St. 
Peter to the beggar who sat by the beautiful gate of 
the temple : " Silver and gold have I none, but such 
as I have give I thee, in the name of Jesus Christ of 
Nazareth, rise up and walk." The exercise of charity 
has become more really a Christian virtue than ever 
before. To relieve necessity has been recognized as 
Christlike ever since that gracious presence healed 
the sick and fed the hungry in Palestine. Every one 
who knows the meaning of love and humanity knows 
that these virtues are voices pleading in human hearts 
the cause of the suffering, and that no man who has 
felt the stirring of the Christ-love in his soul can ever 
after be deaf to the cry of distress. But to minister 
to a human soul in its weakness and despair is a far 
higher service than to feed a hungry stomach. To 
give a man character and purpose is nobler than to 



THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 55 

give him clothes and money. In these days we begin 
to see that the only charity which can be effectual, 
indeed the only charity which is not positively mis- 
chievous, is that which has for its ultimate aim the 
betterment of life and character. The true purpose 
of charity is not to carry those who have fallen by 
the wayside in the journey of life, but to hold out the 
helping hand that shall aid the weary straggler to his 
feet again and shall fill his body with strength and 
his soul with courage and high purpose so that he 
shall go forward once more for himself. When we 
come to consider charity from this standpoint, the 
standpoint of all modern scientific charity workers 
whatever their religious opinions, we see at once that 
its aim is identical with that of the Christian Church. 
The aim of the Church is the betterment of all human 
life and all human relations by the strengthening of 
the inner springs of right action. The aim of char- 
ity is the betterment of the life and relations of a 
particular class of men by the strengthening and de- 
velopment of their inner powers. 

Just here lies one of the lessons that men most 
need to learn to-day. The present is emphatically a 
charitable age. The provisions for the relief of dis- 
tress were never so great. The public determination 
that distress shall be relieved is everywhere strong. 
The laws are increasingly humane, the conditions of 
life are constantly being made easier for those whose 
lots are cast in the harder places. And yet, as far as 
the popular mind at least is concerned, the greater 
part of all this has not yet gone beyond the limits of 
habit or sentiment. We assent to public charity, and 



56 THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 

we give to private charity as a matter of course, or 
we are soft-hearted and cannot bear to hear of misery 
or to look upon its ghastly face. Let some specific 
story of want or distress be told in the public prints 
or even related to the crowd that gathers on a street- 
corner, and the response in money is instant and 
liberal. We do not mean that any one shall go sup- 
perless to bed or sleep under the open sky if we can 
help it, and we do not always stop to ask how he 
came into his present strait, or to consider that a little 
of the discipline of hunger may be good for him, or 
even to assure ourselves of the truthfulness of his 
tale of woe. This ready charity, sweet and laudable 
as it is, needs to be inspired and directed by intelli- 
gent comprehension of the things that it should aim 
to secure. It should have in mind always the man 
himself and his relations to his fellows. It is not 
best for him or for them simply to safeguard his life 
and relieve him from his burdens if we leave him 
himself precisely where he was. 

There are cases of genuine misfortune and unde- 
served distress, suffering that falls on innocent heads, 
and such cases cannot be dealt with too tenderly, but 
the great mass of the suffering that calls aloud for re- 
lief is the result of the ignorance, the dissipation, the 
laziness, or the perversity of the sufferer or of some 
one on whom the sufferer is dependent. The ordinary 
tramp is not such because he cannot find work, but 
because he can always find some one who will con- 
sider that the mere fact that he is hungry is a suffi- 
cient reason for giving him a meal. There are 
comparatively few families dependent upon charity 



THE CHURCH ANL CHARITY. 57 

for their support where there is not some one who 
ought to be a wage-earner who would rather beg than 
work and is perfectly content to idle away a worthless 
life, drinking up all that the rest of the family can 
earn, and confident that a soft-hearted, perhaps we 
should be justified in saying soft-headed, public will 
never let him starve. These people stand in the very 
deepest need of help. They really need some kind of 
help far more than the merely unfortunate and deserv- 
ing. But when we begin to help them we take a large 
contract. It is not sufficient to give them something 
when their distress becomes intolerable. That is 
simply the beginning of responsibility. Such a per- 
son in his present state is useless to himself and dan- 
gerous to the community. If we could leave him 
entirely to nature, nature would either kill him or 
make him work. If we simply take him off nature's 
hands we relieve him of the burdens other men have 
to bear, we perpetuate his pauperism, and we proba- 
bly found a rapidly increasing family of paupers. It 
would be a great deal better for all concerned to let 
him starve. But, bad as he is, he is my brother, and 
has a claim on my assistance, and that claim is a 
deeper and more persistent one than I can discharge 
by the gift of the casual dollar. My duty to society 
and my duty to him demand that I should do more 
than preserve his life and lighten his burdens. They 
demand that I should study and try to solve the prob- 
lem of making him a useful member of society and a 
righteous man. Perfunctory obedience to habit, or 
good-natured yielding to sentimental impulse, will 
not do these things. We have made a good begin- 



68 THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 

ning, but it is only a beginning as yet. As a people 
we need to become so filled and saturated with the 
tbougbt of the real aims of charity that we can never 
forget it. Charity finds its sole justification when it 
concerns itself with the moral and spiritual uplift, 
the general betterment in character, of its objects. 
When it does not concern itself with these things it is 
an unwise and dangerous meddling with the equations 
of nature. Charity, then, is a divine service, a divine 
ministry to men, not simply because it has been as- 
sociated with the Church and patronized by it, nor 
even because it seems a natural manifestation of the 
Christlike character, but in itself, because it is a 
working out of God's plan, that plan which looks to 
the uplifting of all humanity till it touches the level 
of its divine possibilities. The man who works along 
the lines of modern charity is a real minister of God, 
and is doing a part of the work of the Church, even 
though he might be astonished, and perhaps even 
indignant, to be told so. 

This modern increased recognition of the need of 
charity and widening interest in charitable work has 
naturally raised the question of administration. In 
whose hands should the carrying on of the work be 
properly lodged? Many persons, influenced by the 
still surviving traditions of different conditions, reply 
at once that charity should still be under ecclesiastical 
control. If we recognize the religious and Christian 
character of charity, by whose hands should it be ad- 
ministered save by those of the ambassadors of Christ, 
the ministers of his Church? The great Catholic 
Church points with pride to her vast charitable foun- 



THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 59 

dations, and delights to compare them with the com- 
paratively little that Protestantism has to show of 
the same kind, but neglects to say at the same time 
that these are possible, not simply because she teaches 
her children to be charitable, but because she insists 
also upon controlling the administration of their 
charities. Many Protestants share the old feeling 
and consider that denominational charities, ecclesias- 
tically administered, are the most desirable means of 
reaching and helping those who stand in need of help. 
The idea that the dominance of Church influence 
means actual Church control dies hard, and in many 
cases also the good churchman feels that Church chari- 
ties are desirable in order that their beneficiaries may 
be brought by their means t© a deeper interest in what 
seems to him to be not merely the centre but the cir- 
cumference also of religion, public worship. There 
is certain helpful work which we are in the habit of 
calling charity, which ought never to go outside the 
limits of the church or congregation, nor ought it to 
be included in any sociological discussion of charity. 
The Church of Christ is a great social force, we are 
contending, but the individual church or congregation 
is an association having in it many of the elements of 
family life. Its members are bound in close commu- 
nity of thought, of interest, of effort. They are near 
to each other, and ought to be dear to each other. 
When trouble or distress come into a family its mem- 
bers stand ready to help each other. They do not 
regard it as a charity. They regard it as one of the 
proper and natural conditions of family life that the 
suffering brother or sister or the worn and broken 



60 THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 

parent shall not be left to suffer or allowed to depend 
on the charity of strangers. So when trouble comes 
into a parish the stronger members should help the 
weaker to bear their burdens, not as a matter of char- 
ity, but as a matter of family affection, the tenderness 
of the religious family which will not allow its faith- 
ful members to suffer or to depend on the assistance 
of others. That work belongs within the line of the 
ministration of the individual church and should 
never be neglected or perfunctorily performed. But 
the great problem of charity in general is far different 
from this. It has regard to the wants and needs of a 
great and, in places at least, increasing class in the 
community at large. 

A general system of ecclesiastical administration 
of charity is no longer possible, even if it has ever 
been desirable. The formal and organic unity of one 
great Church, so long the cherished dream of the 
ecclesiastic, is not now possible. With it has gone 
the possibility of a vast and comprehensive scheme of 
Church charity. Church charity to-day must be di- 
vided and on a small scale, with all that that implies 
in waste of resources. This objection alone would 
be practically fatal to the attempt to carry on the ad- 
ministration of modern charity through the official 
medium of ecclesiastical organizations. The problems 
involved are so vast, the needs so great, and the work 
so difficult, that every ounce of available power is 
absolutely needed. We cannot afford to adopt or 
encourage any system whatever which involves the 
waste of that power by division or by the overlapping 
of the work of various differing and sometimes con- 



THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 61 

flicting agencies. Harmony and concentration are 
what we need, not rivalry and multiplication. Church 
charity to-day has inevitably degenerated into denomi- 
national charity, and denominational charity is almost 
as bad as denominational education. It must, almost 
necessarily, make general interests secondary to de- 
nominational interests. The denominational charity 
is likely to be specifically limited to those of its own 
communion, and if not specifically is generally actu- 
ally so. Even if no one is formally rejected, those of 
different communions are likely to be treated with 
less sympathy than the orthodox, and to feel a natu- 
ral hesitancy to receive assistance from such a source. 
No matter how broad the scope of a denominational 
charity, it is almost impossible that it should not be 
made more or less the means of denominational prose- 
lyting. The recipients of its bounties are said to be 
"reached" by its ministrations, the way is opened 
for the operation of other influences, and gratitude 
for help received is naturally expected to have its 
influence on the conduct of the recipient. The prop- 
osition that a denomination or a congregation take up 
some work of charity raises at once the question, 
"What good will it do us?" and if no prospective 
return for the outlay proposed can be shown in num- 
bers or tangible resources the interest in it flags at 
once. 

It is of course true that there are some cases where 
these evils are reduced to a minimum, but there is 
another objection to ecclesiastical administration of 
charity which is even more prejudicial to its success. 
Such administration shuts out great numbers of ear- 



62 THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 

nest and useful people who are not interested in the 
Cliurch which, assumes to do the work or, perhaps, in 
any Church. It is a well-known fact that, especially 
in other countries, many of the most earnest workers 
in efforts for the amelioration of the condition of the 
poor through charitable means are not professed ad- 
herents of any church, and are not infrequently actual 
opponents of the dominant church. It is not neces- 
sary at present to discuss the wisdom or the reverse 
of their position. It is necessary, however, to recog- 
nize their existence and to recognize also the possi- 
bilities of usefulness in needed work that lie in them. 
Surely their relations to Christianity will not be 
improved by a course of action which seems at least 
to assume that their efforts are not recognized and 
their aid not desired. It is more than probable that 
the best way to win them back to faith in Christ and 
his Church lies through that growing appreciation 
and respect which always come with close union in 
useful work. The invaluable aid of such persons can 
not be commanded for ecclesiastically administered 
charities. Neither can the aid of the adherents of 
one creed be commanded for the official charities of 
another. Therefore there must inevitably be chari- 
ties outside the Church, or the needy must be deprived 
of the services of many efficient helpers, and the pos- 
sible helpers themselves must lose the benefits which 
come to men as they engage in the service of others. 

The recoil has been in the direction of charities 
administered entirely by the State. The growing 
recognition of the sociological side of charity has 
overshadowed, in many minds, the conception of its 



THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 63 

religious side. That charity is in the real interest of 
the State, that its aim ought to be the same as that 
which the State ought to pursue with regard to all 
citizens, that the community owes a certain duty 
towards its worn-out or incompetent members, that 
the burden of this duty ought to be as widely distrib- 
uted as possible, all these things are true. It is true 
also that there is a large class of cases that can prop- 
erly be dealt with only by the State. Charity and 
correction lie very near together. They merge into 
each other as we descend the scale of social life. 
This connection has now come to be recognized fully 
by the students and workers in these matters, and the 
conferences of charities and correction which are so 
rapidly increasing in frequency show enlarging ap- 
preciation of the real unity of the work. The con- 
firmed pauper, the vicious tramp, the irreclaimable of 
every kind who has sunk below the possibility of 
recovery to usefulness and self-support must be dealt 
with by the State. For the present at least it seems 
necessary that a vast amount of institutional charity 
must remain in the public charge. Certain causes, 
probably largely preventable, but lying outside the 
range of the present discussion, are accumulating on 
our hands a rapidly increasing percentage of pauper- 
ism and insanity. Though an ideal community would 
take care of this very largely by private benevolence, 
our communities, as at present constituted, are not 
likely to make such general contributions as would be 
needed for that purpose except through the agency of 
the unavoidable tax-collector. These persons must 
be taken care of somehow, and until the whole people, 



64 THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 

rather than a comparatively few of them, shall be 
ready to help those who need help the State charities 
must be very large and very numerous. * 

Added to these considerations is the growing ten- 
dency among certain thinkers to look to the State as 
a sort of tutelary divinity which is to attend to every- 
body's needs, level all unjust distinctions, right all 
wrongs, and in some mysterious way usher in the true 
golden age. This is hardly the time to point out the 
errors in this way of thinking, or to remind you of 
the necessary limitations on the wisdom and power of 
the State as an abstract unit, or, indeed, of the dan- 
gers that beset the habit of considering it as an ab- 
stract unit at all. It is proper, however, to point out 
one grave objection to State charity. It has little or 
no personal element in it. Lacking the personal ele- 
ment, it necessarily lacks the ethical qualities which 
alone make it valuable. It may, indeed, improve the 
material condition of the man, but it is not very likely 
to improve the man. In order that charity shall be 
really helpful, it should develop the finer feelings of 
helpfulness and brotherly sympathy on the part of 
both the helper and the helped. It should bring out, 
through that sympathy, those high and strong quali- 
ties of manhood which make men self-reliant, compe- 
tent, and useful. What development of self-reliance, 
what consciousness of human sympathy, can come 
from the reception of that which is needed for the 
relief of present want from the mechanical hands of 
the official representative of a mere abstraction? This 
man is hungry; he has a right to go somewhere and 
be fed from some mysterious source. Besides the 



THE CHITRCH AND CHARITY. 65 

mere food he gets nothing but the debilitating habit 
of dependence. To the official he is a "case," to no- 
body else is he anything. Why should he try to walk 
when nobody cares whether he walks or not and there 
is a machine which will carry him? Such is the in- 
evitable result of a purely State charity. The sav- 
ing fact that so many of the administrators of the 
already existing public charities take real interest in 
those with whom they come into contact, and strive 
to counteract the tendency in this direction, comes 
about because charity has only partially fallen into 
the hands of the State and its religious side still has 
large recognition. 

Bureaucracy is the one thing that is more intoler- 
able in charity than ecclesiasticism. The inevitable 
tendency of public relief is directly opposed to the 
real purpose of charity. Instead of drawing out the 
manhood of the recipient, cultivating his self-respect, 
and encouraging him to try to walk by himself, it has a 
constant tendency to weaken and destroy these quali- 
ties. Every one who has had any experience in the 
administration of public relief knows that, in the very 
great majority of cases, every gift is easier to receive 
than the last, and every effort at self-help weaker than 
the one before till the time comes when the bitter 
bread of dependence, once sought with shame and 
eaten with tears, is demanded as a right, and taken 
with regret only that there is no more to be had. In 
order that charity may effectually accomplish its true 
ends there should be a gradation of its recipients, and 
the aid of the State should be extended only where' 
absolutely needed. Starting from the bottom of the 



66 THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 

scale, next to the absolutely criminal class there comes 
a large class who, though hardly criminal, yet from 
mental and moral weakness and incapacity need re- 
straint upon their actions. These, of course, must be 
restrained and cared for by the State. It is not safe 
to lodge powers of restraint in private hands. Then 
comes a large class who are not criminal or in need of 
actual restraint, who are yet entirely dependent, and 
need to be gathered into institutions. At present, 
and probably for some time to come, these must be 
largely State institutions. The aim, however, ought 
to be to relieve the State of the care of such persons 
as rapidly as possible, and to place such institutions 
on private foundations. This is hardly the trend of 
current opinion, yet there can be very little doubt 
that the necessary shortcomings of institutionalism 
are very largely modified for the better when the per- 
sonal and private element in the management replaces 
the mechanical and official. 

Then there is the large class of partially self-sup- 
porting who are in receipt of more or less out-of-door 
relief. It is in the treatment of this class that the 
greatest care is needed, that the most mistakes are 
made, and that there is the most hopeful prospect of 
desirable results. The reclaimables are here, and yet 
it is from this source that the lower grades of pauper- 
ism and criminality are most largely recruited. The 
hope for the future lies very largely in such careful 
and intelligent treatment of this class that an increas- 
ing proportion of its members, instead of dropping 
t*hrough it into the deeps below, may be raised out of 
it to the heights above. A very large portion of them 



THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 6*7 

are reclaimable. They can be helped and encouraged 
to do their best, and so enabled to help themselves, 
at most with the aid of but slight assistance. Many 
of them are the victims of temporary misfortune, and 
if cared for tenderly and sympathetically might soon 
be restored to usefulness, but temporary misfortune 
very easily degenerates into permanent pauperism if 
not wisely treated. Many of them are the victims of 
ignorance, and need only helpful advice and kindly, 
sympathetic counsel. Many are the victims of their 
surroundings, and need only to have their eyes opened 
to the vision of a better and larger life to make great 
and availing efforts to attain it. These people need 
the earnest and consecrated efforts of friends more 
than they need anything else. It is an extreme 
position to say that the public should never give any 
outside relief. As matters are at present it seems 
inevitable that a certain amount of such relief should 
be given. But it should always be supplemented by 
private and personal help and influence, and should 
never be extended to those who prove themselves 
irreclaimable. Such cases should be placed in insti- 
tutions or under restraint much more rigorously than 
is now the practice. 

As far as possible the actual administration of all 
charity, whether public or private, should be placed 
in the hands of interested individuals who should be 
brought into more than merely official relations with 
those whom they design to help. Whenever it is 
needed that persons should be found who can give 
their whole time to the work, and must consequently 
be salaried, care ought to be taken that the work, and 



68 THE CHTJECH AND CHARITY. 

not the salary, is their principal interest. A personal 
interest and an intelligent desire to help are the needs, 
and not any kind of officialism, ecclesiastical or polit- 
ical. The splendid work being done in so many dif- 
ferent ways by private combinations for charitable 
effort, and the valuable assistance they are rendering 
both to State and to Church show their competence to 
deal with the matter in hand. Here there is more 
freedom from officialism and sectarianism, more union 
of effort of persons having a common aim. Ko one 
is barred by any prejudice or by any irrelevant re- 
quirement from participation either in the labor or 
the benefits of the effort. Although the administra- 
tion of charity ought thus to be free from ecclesiasti- 
cal control there is abundant need and abundant room 
for the interest and labor of the Church in this field. 
Here, as everywhere, the Church ought to be the 
leader and the inspirer. The absolute need of the 
religious rather than the purely secular view of char- 
ity has perhaps been sufficiently dwelt upon already. 
There must be something in it that shall keep it sweet 
and tender and human. What better than the loving 
brotherliness which is the mark of a true Christianity? 
How shall this influence of the Church be exercised 
in such way that its spirit shall guide where its or- 
ganism does not control? — that is the practical ques- 
tion. 

There is a familiar old saying that charity begins 
at home. The work of the Church in behalf of char- 
ity ought to begin in the same place. It ought to 
strive earnestly to impress upon its members the duty 
of charity. Perhaps this may seem trite, a mere 



THE CHUKCH AND CHARITY. 69 

platitude. It may well be doubted, however, whether 
any branch of the Church is doing all that might be 
done in this direction. The Church needs to come to 
higher ground in this matter. It is not sufficient to 
teach men that they ought to be charitable because 
God demands it and because they are in danger of 
the punishments of disobedience if they do not com- 
ply with the demand. An almsgiving which is lend- 
ing to the Lord on good security for large interest, 
or which is the purchase-money of a personal sal- 
vation, is not charity. It is not sufficient to urge 
charity as an auxiliary to Church work, one of the 
oars, if you please, of the life-boat which is to save 
here and there an individual from the wreck of a lost 
world. A kindergarten or a girl's club which is 
merely a recruiting-ground for a parish or a source of 
denominational self-glorification is not charity. It is 
not sufficient to exhort men to put large checks into 
the contribution-box or even to endow hospitals by 
will. The giving of dollars which are somehow to 
find their way into the pockets of some supposititious 
poor people whom the givers have never seen; the 
provision for the enjoyment by some strangers of 
goods whose owner has gone where they can no longer 
serve his naked soul; the doing of those things which 
causes one's name to be heralded in the public prints 
as that of a philanthropist; these things are not really 
charity, though they may be productive of a great 
deal of good. 

The Church ought to teach its members giving be- 
cause of the needs of others, and because of the blessed- 
ness of giving. It ought to rebuke them sternly when 



iO THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 

they ask in some purely mercantile spirit, " What are 
we going to get out of it ? " and turn their attention 
to its higher and nobler aspects. The face of the 
Church ought to be set as sternly against religious 
selfishness as against any other kind of selfishness. 
The Church ought to be insistent in urging the desira- 
bility of personal charity work upon its members. 
They are the most really charitable who in some way 
do personal work for the needy. Those dollars which 
are carried, rather than sent, are the ones which take 
the largest blessing with them. It does not follow 
that charity should be individual. It is far better 
and wiser that it should be organized, but the charity 
organization should apply the personal work of its 
members, as well as their contributions of money, to 
the labor in hand. The most ennobling and the most 
successful of charity work is that which is done 
through many centres of personal influence. We 
want to break up this mass of congested poverty, and 
we want to bring its individual units into some sort 
of personal relations with men and women who have 
the desire and the capacity to help them. One char- 
ity worker can properly help only a small group. 
That one person gathers the members of that group 
around him and becomes a part of the life of every 
member of it. The usefulness of the organization 
comes in the systematizing and directing of this per- 
sonal effort. Not all the charitably inclined can do 
the same amount of personal work, though it is greatly 
to be regretted that so many persons find their limita- 
tions so easily, and the organization can collect and 
administer the financial support of those who feel that 



THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 71 

they can be useful in that way alone. The organiza- 
tion can prevent the overlapping of the influence of 
these centres, can prevent imposition, and can save 
much valuable time and concentrate much needed 
strength. It can make the individual much more effi- 
cient, but it must not be allowed to take the place of 
the individual, even in the thought of the people. 
When men come together and clasp each other's hands 
and look into each other's faces, and see with their 
own eyes each other's needs and each other's quali- 
ties, there grows up between them that fine bond of 
sacred sympathy which enables them to help each 
other, and strengthens each by that which is given 
as well as by that which is received. The Church 
can do much toward setting up those personal rela- 
tions between man and man that make human brother- 
hood real and efface the arbitrary and unchristian 
distinctions of caste. 

Above all, the Church ought to insist upon the in- 
trinsic holiness of charity. Charity is holy, not be- 
cause of its connection with the Church, but because 
it is in itself God's work. It is one of the means by 
which a higher manhood is revealed to men and the 
way to it opened for them, and as such it is a divine 
ministry. The man who devotes his energy and his 
ingenuity to serving men through the great modern 
charities is as truly a minister of God as if he had been 
consecrated by solemn laying on of hands and set 
apart by some special title of honor. His office has 
sanctity in itself; it does not need that any shall be 
reflected upon it from without. This same teaching 
is needed by the secularist in charity in order that he 



72 THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 

may have tlie true nature of his own work interpreted 
to him. How many zealous men there are whose life 
and thought are given to charity and reform who deny, 
even with indignation sometimes, their connection 
with the Christian Church. They do not believe in 
Christianity. It is a superstition. It has nothing 
for them. They believe in the religion of humanity. 
They ought to be shown that the true religion of 
humanity, the religion which has to do with making 
men good and true and happy here, which looks to the 
present establishment of just and happy conditions, 
which devotes life and strength and talents to the 
present service of humanity, is the true Christianity, 
the true following of Him who went about doing good, 
taught men to pray, " Thy kingdom come. Thy will be 
done in earth as it is in heaven," closed His ears to 
the anxious voices of His timid kindred and, stretch- 
ing His hands toward the poor, ignorant, diseased, 
sinful crowd around Him, said, " These are my mother 
and my brethren." In so far as such service lacks 
the outlook into the things of the spirit and the larger 
life beyond we cannot but feel that it is incomplete 
and falls short of its own full development, but as far 
as it goes it is in perfect and entire accord with the 
best teaching of the Church. Eormal Christianty will 
have more friends and warmer ones than now when 
it persuades itself and teaches others that the Christ 
life and not the human phrases are the essence of 
Christianity. When the Church mistakes its friends 
and allies for enemies, what wonder that they return 
hostility for hostility! Here, as elsewhere, men con- 
demn the Church because they do not understand it, 



THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 73 

and it is not clear that the Church is doing all that 
could be done to remove the misunderstanding. 

This interpretation of the higher meanings of char- 
ity can do much for those who have charge of those 
public charities which seem necessary. The public 
ofl&cial needs to have the sacredness of his calling im- 
pressed upon him. There is the greatest need that 
all public charity should be softened and humanized 
and made really helpful to those who receive it, in- 
stead of becoming hard and degrading as is too often 
the case. The Church can do much here, not only 
through its direct influence over public officials, but 
by the formation of a public opinion which shall rec- 
ognize the peculiar delicacy of the employment and 
the special qualifications which are needed for it, and 
shall insist that only the right persons shall be chosen 
for such positions and shall see that, when chosen, 
they shall remain faithful to their high calling. That 
positions in institutions for charity or correction 
should be bestowed merely as rewards for political 
service in the cause of some influential boss is one of 
the crying disgraces of our modern society. When 
the public makes up its mind what it wants it will get 
it, but as long as it is indifferent self-seeking medi- 
ocrity or political rascality have as good a chance of 
success as anything better. If the Church is faithful 
to its opportunity to form public opinion by the in- 
struction of precept and example, the possibilities of 
its influence over the thinking of the people are almost 
boundless. 

The Church can do much for charity, again, by 
standing always for the highest conceptions of it. 



74 THE CHUBCH AND CHARITY. 

Perhaps enough has already been said incidentally to 
show in a. general way what those conceptions are. 
But, as already said, the true meaning and purpose 
of charity are not yet universally or even generally 
understood. There is much work yet to be done in 
impressing adequate definitions of it and adequate 
conceptions of its office on the people at large. This 
work can be done to great advantage by the Church 
because it has especial facilities for reaching the pub- 
lic ear. It is true that much of that work is being 
done, and well done, by others. But there yet remains 
much that the Church can do better than any other 
agency. The greatest danger that besets modern 
charity is the great danger of modern civilization, the 
danger of the swamping of the spiritual by the mate- 
rial. The Church can do a much-needed work in 
standing for the truth that charity must not only 
relieve a man's want, which has always been seen, and 
make him a useful and self-supporting social unit, 
which is now being seen, but that it must also de- 
velop and cultivate the higher and finer sides of his 
moral and spiritual nature, which is not very clearly 
seen even now. Charity has business with the souls 
as well as with the bodies of men, with their characters 
as well as with their economic values. The Church 
can do much good work by standing for this special 
truth because, with all due deference to other helpers 
of the race, the Christian ideal of manhood is the 
highest that has yet been presented and its conception 
of human needs on the spiritual side the largest that 
has yet been formed. 



THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 75 

The effects of charity on these finer human sensibil- 
ities will depend very much on the way charity is 
received, and that, of course, must depend largely on 
the way in which it is presented. It may be received 
as simply a due. The old saying that the world owes 
every man a living is yet of common acceptation, and 
there are not a few people who have no higher concep- 
tion of society and government than that they are a 
sort of vast insurance company and that they owe 
support and protection to every man, not because his 
fellows love him and desire to help him, but because 
of his own intrinsic rights in the matter. As has been 
already pointed out there is no ethical value in charity 
which is given and received as a part of the social 
compact. It is a very unfortunate thing for any man 
when his thoughts become centred upon his rights, 
and his efforts upon getting the things other men owe 
him. Again charity may be received as a sort of 
peace-offering from those who have more than their 
share of the world's goods and compromise with their 
own consciences or buy the forbearance of their fellows 
by the giving up of some portion of their superfluity. 
From the days when the robber-barons founded con- 
vent doles to the days when the robber-brokers endow 
institutional churches there has been altogether too 
much of this compounding with heaven and humanity 
for a percentage of unlawful profits. Nothing can be 
more dangerous to society or more degrading to the 
individual than the conception that every rich man is 
a robber and his charities only a partial restitution of 
that which he ought never to have possessed, a general 



76 THE CHURCH AND CHARITY. 

conception which might not unfairly be formed from 
certain modern instances and which some people seem 
mischievously bent on spreading. 

Again, charity may be given as an act of extreme 
condescension, a princely stepping down of a superior 
being into the sphere of lives and needs which are no 
real concern of him or his. When pride and servility 
stand between the giver and the receiver the gift is a 
curse to both. The meanest and lowest of human pas- 
sions are developed by it, and the higher ones are 
paralyzed. Charity is helpful and elevating only 
when it is given and received not as a due, not as a 
bribe, not as an ostentatious condescension, but as the 
expression of a warm and loving sympathy. The gift 
should go forth because the giver has a real personal 
love for the receiver and wishes to do something to 
help him. That is giving in the name and in the 
spirit of Christ, because that is the way Christ gave 
and would give now if he were here in person. The 
help which comes warm with a personal interest and 
bearing the solid assurance of an affection which not 
simply transcends but ignores social differences is the 
help that does the most to raise the recipient. The 
men who have moved their fellows most deeply and 
helped them most largely have been those who have 
had this rare gift of real charity, this power to make 
them feel their human brotherhood and their real 
nearness to each other. The London poor who loved 
to call the noble Shaftesbury ^^our earl," were neither 
dazzled by his coronet nor jealous of his riches. They 
saw in him neither the aristocrat nor the plutocrat. 
They saw in him a brother, a man who worked for 



THE CHURCH AND CHAEITY. 77 

them not for fame, nor for political ends, nor from a 
belief that he might so get favor in the eyes of God, 
but because he loved them, because he had a kindly 
feeling for every costermonger and chimney-sweep of 
them all. That is the charity that is humane, that 
is the charity that is helpful, that is the charity that 
is economically and socially valuable, that is the 
charity that is Christian. It ought to be the aim, as 
it is the heaven-sent mission, of the Church of Christ 
to hold that ideal of charity before the world and to 
strive to inspire all charity with that spirit. If the 
Church will hold and teach consistently and patiently 
the true aims and purposes of charity, and will show 
men the best and most helpful ideals of charity, the 
Church will soon find that its spirit and influence are 
dominant in all charitable work. 



IV. 

THE CHURCH AND BUSINESS. 



Up to tMs point we have been considering the in- 
fluence and work of the Church in certain fields of 
human activity which are generally recognized as 
lying close to its particular sphere of operation. It is 
common to associate the Church with education and 
with charity, but there are certain matters whose con- 
nection with the life and work of the Church are not 
so commonly recognized to which we are now to turn 
our attention. The mischievous distinction already 
commented upon between the sacred and secular sides 
of life has drawn a clear and strong line of demarca- 
tion between the religious life of men and their busi- 
ness life. These two lines of activity have come to 
be regarded as so entirely separate from each other 
that their reconciliation has been considered matter 
for special effort, while their association has rarely 
been dreamed of. It is by no means certain that all 
devout souls would regard with entire satisfaction the 
assertion of the principle that the administration 
of a thing so distinctly " worldly " as business forms 

78 



THE CHUKCH AND BUSINESS. 79 

a part of a man's religious duty and should be kept 
under the control of his religious sentiments. Por 
different reasons the proposition might be equally ob- 
jectionable to persons of less lively religious convic- 
tions. That, however, is precisely the position which 
this lecture seeks to maintain. 

It is not difficult to see that the conditions of mod- 
ern business are largely such as to lend some warrant 
to the ordinary thought concerning it. Perhaps we 
do not ourselves realize the intensity of the demands 
which those conditions make upon us, and the tremen- 
dous draughts which modern business life necessarily 
makes upon the energies of mind and body. Popula- 
tions have enormously increased. The consuming 
power of men has also increased almost beyond com- 
putation. ISTew wants have been created and old 
wants intensified. Inventive genius has not only kept 
pace with these expanding demands, but has anticipated 
them and in its turn created others. Pacility and 
speed of communication have drawn men into closer 
connection with each other and expanded vastly the 
field of individual operations. A modern business 
man deals not simply with a neighborhood or a single 
city, but with the world. The electric telegraph and 
an improved postal system, while greatly shortening 
the time consumed in business operations, have largely 
increased the complexity and even the number of these 
operations. These things alone would make the de- 
mands of business sufficiently absorbing, but in addi- 
tion to all this comes the fierce rivalry of modern 
competition. The world of business is crowded with 
clear-eyed, keen-witted men all intent upon profit. 



80 THE CHURCH AND BUSINESS. 

No man can hold Ms particular field of operations 
secure from the invasion of his rivals. Distance and 
seclusion are no bars to the activity of the commercial 
traveller or to the extension of trade. The business 
man has the markets of his country and of the world 
open to him, and every market is invaded by the rep- 
resentatives of the most distant firms. The merchant 
can hold his ground only by virtue of his superior 
skill and energy and the greater advantages he can 
offer his customers. His place once lost in these 
regards he is forced out of the fight, disabled. He 
loses not only his profits but his subsistence, and adds 
one more to the great multitude of financial wrecks. 
These conditions are not limited to a special class, but 
apply more or less fully to every man engaged in any 
capacity in the manifold concerns of business. 

Is it surprising that so many men find that their 
business life leaves them no time or strength for 
spiritual life ? The very physical exhaustion caused 
by such a life counts for much. When rest is possible, 
it seems indispensable that it should be absolute. 
Weariness of body does not generally conduce to 
activity of mind. Social recreations, the lighter kinds 
of literature, and other things which are amusement 
only are eagerly sought for to fill, rather than occupy, 
the time of rest. Mind and body share the weariness. 
It is a task to get about anything that requires physi- 
cal exertion. It is a still greater task to get about 
anything which requires mental exertion. The seri- 
ous book gives way to the light one and both to the 
short magazine article. Subjects which require deep 
and continuous thought are avoided because mental 



THE CHUECH AND BUSINESS. 81 

strength must be reserved for business calculations. 
Business thought engrosses the mind more and more. 
A sort of fascination draws the business man to his 
post office boXj or even to his desk, on Sundays and 
holidays. There is the driving habit of work, and 
the half -conscious fear that some point may be lost in 
the great, close game that has competence for self 
and support for family as its stakes. The mind thus 
absorbed in material things loses its power to perceive 
spiritual things and to deal with spiritual problems. 
Negligence becomes indifference and indifference sinks 
into entire obliviousness simply through lack of use 
of certain sides of the mental nature, just as the 
muscles of an arm will become atrophied and finally 
useless if it is allowed to remain permanently unused. 
Many persons after feeling forced for years to lead 
lives of entire absorption in business pursuits find at 
Jast that their horizon has been narrowed and their re- 
sources have been sadly reduced. They are actually 
incapacitated for anything except the continued pur- 
suit of the occupation which, once sought as the slave 
who should bring them the good things of life, now 
bestrides them as a master and drives them in its own 
ways, as the unhappy sailor in the eastern tale was 
driven by the old man of the sea. We shall none of 
us be obliged to go outside the circle of our own 
acquaintances to find examples of such lives. The 
world calls them successful ; they who examine them 
more closely and try them by the standards of true 
life and real success find that they are wrecks of 
splendid possibilities. There is many a business man 
who is the abject slave of his vast possessions. In- 



82 THE CHUUCH AND BUSINESS. 

stead of possessing his riclies they possess him. He 
has paid for them by years of absorbed effort in one 
single direction. He has sacrificed for them all the 
thought and all the effort that round out life and 
sweeten character. He has denied himself the luxury 
and the mental and spiritual food of education, of 
society, of travel, of charitable and philanthropic 
interests. He has always put off these things till the 
by and by when he should have the time and the 
means to indulge in them. Now years are upon him. 
His early interests have faded and died. His life is 
in his counting-room. His thought is all for business. 
He realizes that the care and preservation of riches 
are as laborious and as confining as the acquisition 
of them. He has neither the power to do nor the 
capacity to enjoy the things which put the real power 
and the real happiness into human life, and so he 
drudges at his task till death releases him from his 
chains and opens the doors of a larger life. Some- 
times he breaks the shackles of habit sufficiently to 
provide by his will for the doing of some of those 
things by his executors whose doing ought to have 
blessed and enriched himself in life, but more often 
the old influence is too strong and all goes to private 
and selfish uses. This is not intended as a characteri- 
zation of American business men as a class, but it is a 
description of a type more common than it ought to 
be and only too familiar to us all in spite of the many 
and splendid instances of better use of wealth and 
opportunity. 

We are sometimes told that the present age is pre- 
eminently an age of materialism. There is room for 



l^HE CHURCH AND BUSINESS. 83 

a great deal of doubt as to the correctness of the 
characterization. It is true that the immense strides 
made in the study of nature and natural phenomena 
within comparatively recent years have had a ten- 
dency to draw a great deal of attention to the material 
side of things. The pursuit has been most engross- 
ingly fascinating and the subject-matter has proved 
so vast as to fill men with awe at its inexhaustible- 
ness and impress their minds most vividly with a 
sense of its tremendous importance. Many minds, 
among them not a few of the most powerful and 
influential of the time, have bent themselves so exclu- 
sively to the study of these matters that they have 
lost sight of, or ignored entirely, the spiritual side of 
nature and of man and have led their followers into 
the same error. Their contribution to the welfare of 
humanity has been enormous and is by no means to 
be ignored or slighted. Their error has been in mis- 
taking a part of the universe for the whole of it. 
But in thought at least there has been a reaction 
from materialism. The tone of the thought of the 
last ten years has been distinctly more spiritual 
and less rationalistic, in the technical and highly 
improper use of that good but most wretchedly 
abused term, than it was previous to that time. The 
science of to-day has cured many of the vagaries of the 
scientific mind of the past and has taught its votaries 
breadth of view and caution of statement. The phi- 
losophers of any age do not form its thought so much 
as they voice its spirit and the attempt, if ever there 
were an}, to found a materialistic philosophy has 
already failed because the thinking of the age, in so 



84 THE CHX^ECH AXD BUSINESS. 

far as it thinks at all, lias ceased to be materialistic. 
Just in that reservation lies the cloud that dims the 
brightness of the outlook. There is a current in 
modern life setting toTvard a most dangerous material- 
ism, a current all the more formidable because it is not 
the result of conviction or thought, but is the result 
of conditions, and works in the absence of thought. 
There is very little danger that men will ever think 
themselves into materialism. There is very large 
danger, however, that their lives may become so filled 
and absorbed by material things that they will drift 
into materialism simply because they have first neg- 
lected to think of anything higher than the material 
and then forgotten how to do so. All this enormous 
increase of business activity, all this tremendous en- 
largement of the material appliances of civilization, 
all this increase of the demand which modern life 
makes on the strength and energy of men, tend to 
draw them away from the spiritual and contemplative 
and concentrate their thought and attention on the 
active and material. It has often been observed that 
the most active places from a business point of view 
are often the most inactive and unpromising from a 
religious point of view, not because the people were 
really worse, but because of their absorption in ma- 
terial pursuits. The materializing tendencies of all 
this business and other activity are immensely in- 
creased by the prominence given to the old and mis- 
chievous distinction between sacred and secular. The 
remedy lies in restoring the proper relation between 
the two sides of life. Meanwhile we may rest assured 
that whatever of real materialistic tendency there is 



THE CHUECH AND BUSINESS. 85 

in the life of to-day is far more the product of Ameri- 
can invention than of German philosophy. 

These things are not said carpingly, nor with the 
desire or intention to discredit either the motives 
or the lives of multitudes of most excellent people. 
There is not the slightest intention to say or imply 
that business men are worse than other men. Indeed, 
the consequences of too continuous devotion to a single 
pursuit may be seen as clearly in the lives of those 
who make some literary or scientific specialty their 
sole concern, as in those of the most devoted followers 
of business. The tendency of specialism is always one- 
sided. A machine of varied capacities always wears 
in certain spots if kept exclusively on one kind of 
work. In precisely the same way the mind that is 
shut up to certain interests, no matter what they are, 
wears itself into grooves, loses power in other direc- 
tions, becomes one-sided in its operations. The inevi- 
table tendency of the age is to specialize, but, while 
none of us can master all subjects or even enter 
all fields, we can yet get far enough out of ourselves 
and our pet activities to prevent that one-sidedness of 
development which is so much to be deplored. ISTor, 
again, is it supposed that all the business men are 
entirely absorbed in their business to the neglect of 
other and higher concerns of life. We all know of 
shining examples to the contrary. The intention is 
only to describe as matter of fact the general tenden- 
cies and frequent results produced in the lives of men 
by modern business conditions. 

Unfortunately, the results of these conditions are 
felt also on the higher and finer sides of human nature. 



86 THE CHXTKCH AKD BUSINESS. 

The man who is fighting for his life cannot stop to 
measure the pain his blows will cause his adversaries. 
The man who throws himself into the competitions of 
modern business with that intensity that success seems 
to demand cannot always stop to think of the loss 
and damage to others which his success may cause. 
He feels that to a great degree he must be intent 
upon his own interest and indifferent to the interests 
of others. Indifference grows upon him and he is 
in danger of becoming not only unnecessarily cold- 
blooded about his business, but selfish and cold in his 
relations to all but his own little circle. Almost 
always the moral atmospheres of places where business 
activity is very great are cold-hearted and selfish. 
The finer graces of life flourish best in quiet places, 
or at least in quiet circles. When a man has become 
habituated to the instant grasping of every fair advan- 
tage it is not a very long step to the taking of advan- 
tages not so fair. Competition and thirst for gain 
easily become so fierce that men feel almost driven to 
take every advantage which does not contain too 
much risk for the taker. So far have these processes 
gone that there are not wanting those who assure us 
seriously that strict honesty is not the best policy, 
that business is a species of war, and that a consistent 
Christian cannot be a successful business man. Young 
men have been infected by thousands with the idea 
that they have no need of religion at all or at best 
must use it only as an amiable accomplishment, the 
ornament of their hours of leisure, and many a work 
on political economy has had no nobler ethics for its 
foundation. Not only so, but certain ways and means 



THE CHUKCH AND BUSINESS. 87 

for getting money have presented themselves to those 
who were willing to engage in them, and certain kinds 
of business have risen and thriven which draw their 
support from the unhealthy humors of the social body 
as the fungus on the stump fattens on the products of 
decomposition. These occupations are instinctively 
felt to be inconsistent with Christian profession, and 
many who are led by the common indifference of 
public opinion in regard to such matters to engage in 
them without thought of personal wrong-doing or 
moral delinquency of any sort yet feel a kind of un- 
easy consciousness that they and the Church of Christ 
are out. of harmony. 

Do we not need as the starting-point of better 
thinking and better living in this regard a higher 
and sounder conception of the real nature of business ? 
The dictionaries define business as that which occu- 
pies men, makes them busy, that is. Perhaps a more 
popular conception of business is that which a man 
does to make a living, — and as much more than a 
living as possible. Such a conception, however, labors 
under the disadvantage, economical as well as ethical, 
of considering all means whereby one may acquire 
money as equally proper and equally reputable. From 
the point of view of economics business is the produc- 
tion and exchange of wealth. Economically speaking, 
these are the proper activities of a man, and he who 
does not occupy himself with them in some way or 
another is a positive hinderance to the well-being of 
society. It follows, therefore, that business which 
does not concern itself with either production or ex- 
change of wealth is not proper business. Those oper- 



88 THE CHUECH AND BUSINESS. 

ations of the stock or produce exchange, for instance, 
which derive their profit from speculations as to 
future changes in the prices of commodities which 
neither party holds, or, worse yet, from the so-called 
" manipulation " of the market so as to force such 
changes and so profit by the losses deliberately in- 
flicted upon others, are at their best on a par with the 
occupation of the faro banker, and at their worst with 
that of the highwayman. The production or exchange, 
again, of those commodities which are injurious to 
their users is equally objectionable to a sound politi- 
cal economy. Injurious things are not wealth, even 
though they may chance to have a money value, for 
the reason that their use must inevitably react most 
unfavorably upon the general producing power of the 
community and so in the end reduce very greatly the 
sum total of the community's wealth. Moreover, it 
does not require a very deep knowledge of political 
economy to see that business methods which enrich 
an individual or a class at the expense of other individ- 
uals or classes, whether such methods are the products 
of law, custom or individual idiosyncracy, are econom- 
ically objectionable. Taking money from one pocket 
and putting it into another does not enrich a man, 
though he may, by emptying all his other pockets, 
fill one to bursting. No more does " robbing Peter to 
pay Paul " add to the collective wealth of communi- 
ties. That most desirable result is achieved only as 
the business of production and exchange is conducted 
so as to secure the greatest productiveness of every 
individual ; that is, so that not one but all shall profit. 
From the point of view of economics the man who 



THE CHUECH AND BUSINESS. 89 

takes an unfair advantage in business commits a 
grave sin against the community in general, as well 
as against his victim in particular. In thus defining 
business from the point of view of a sound^ political 
economy merely, we have already found a point of 
contact and a common standing-ground for this politi- 
cal economy, which is the science of business, and 
Christianity, which is a science of religious life. Eco- 
nomic science condemns certain methods of acquir- 
ing gain as uneconomic, the strongest term of appro- 
brium known to its cold and dignified vocabulary. 
The Church, speaking in its own language, condemns 
the same methods as unrighteous. Economic science 
sets the seal of its condemnation on certain practices 
in the world of business because of their violation of 
the laws of general prosperity. The Church sets the 
seal of its condemnation on precisely the same prac- 
tices because of their violation of Christ's divine law 
of love. 

Not only have the laws of business and the teach- 
ings of Christianity this common standing- ground, but 
business itself, as a prime factor in the material devel- 
opment of humanity, is an important factor in its spir- 
itual development as well. We must not forget how 
deeply the physical, mental and moral sides of human- 
ity react upon each other. We talk much in these 
days about what may be called the outer unities of 
the race. We recognize that unity of interest and 
that mutual dependence which bind together the grand 
brotherhood of humanity, a brotherhood which is 
neither philosophical or sentimental, but actual and 
practical. Much of our doing and more of our think- 



90 THE CHURCH AND BUSIKESS. 

ing are based on that recognition. We are not always 
quite as clearly possessed of the conception of what 
may be called the inner unities of humanity. Some- 
body said recently that the sovereign remedy for An- 
archy is a bread poultice, others see the millennium 
through the schoolhouse door, and others still look for 
it through religion alone. In our zeal for our particu- 
lar line of effort we are in danger of forgetting that 
all these things must go on together with even pace. 
It is true that humanity, though manifold, is one. It 
is equally true that a man, though manifold, is one. 
The old Greek myth represented Prometheus as suf- 
fering the undying hate of Zeus because he brought 
down fire from heaven and so started man on the path 
of development that should finally lead him to equal- 
ity with the gods. The fundamental idea is true. 
The first step in the material advance of man from 
the depths of his original barbarism is also the first 
step in the development of his higher spiritual nature. 
As men begin to produce beyond the demands of their 
individual needs and to feel needs beyond the capacity 
of personal production, exchange follows, wealth is cre- 
ated and civilization begins. New needs are then cre- 
ated, the aesthetic impulses of humanity begin to stir, 
social relations become inevitable, and a constantly de- 
veloping series of new conditions follows. Abnormal 
developments of civilization which may corrupt the 
spiritual by a refined sensuality or sink it in a dom- 
inant materialism are quite possible, but it is always 
true that there must be a certain degree of material 
advancement as the indispensable condition of great 
spiritual advancement. Business is the great factor in 



THE CHURCH AND BUSINESS. 91 

the material development of humanity, and with the 
material development comes the desire, the means and 
the leisure for spiritual development. Upon the busi- 
ness development of a community must depend its 
schools and its asylums, its colleges and its hospitals, its 
churches and its missions. These things are impossi- 
ble in a poor community and improbable in a secluded 
one. The business activity which brings men together 
and which produces the means to provide for the wants 
of the non-producers, as well as those of the more 
active members of the community, is the indispensable 
foundation for the higher and larger developments of 
humanity. There are organic unities in human and 
social life just as there are in nature. The appliances 
for a fine and sweet mental and spiritual development 
can no more exist without a sound and strong material 
development behind them than the fruit can come into 
existence without the rough-barked tree and the black, 
rich soil on and out of which it grows. 

Dr. McGlynn says that during his recent visit to 
Kome an ecclesiastic who differed radically with the 
Doctor's ideas as to economics and as to education said 
to him, " All the people need is bread and the cate- 
chism." It may be the interest of ecclesiasticism that 
the people shall be poor and ignorant, but even the 
most elaborate pastoral care will not develop real relig- 
ion under such conditions. Poverty and ignorance do 
not furnish the soil out of which a perfected humanity 
can grow. The body needs more than mere bread, and 
mind and soul need more than the husks of cate- 
chisms. A man is one, and his improvement must 
proceed by the simultaneous development and bette^^ 



92 THE CHURCH AND BUSINESS. 

ment of every part of his being, or, it can be neither 
sound nor permanent. Anything, therefore, which 
does so develop and better one of the sides of his 
nature is a part, and a necessary part, of the great work 
of raising him to the fulness of the stature of the per- 
fect man. It is in itself a divine ministry, and it 
reaches its completeness and does its perfect work 
when it is so considered and so administered. We 
made the point in a previous lecture that education 
was intrinsically a religious ministry because it was 
the agency for carrying out one of the details of the 
divine plan by the development of one of the sides 
of human nature. So we may make the same point in 
regard to business. It is intrinsically a religious min- 
istry because it is the chief agency for carrying out 
another part of the same divine plan. Humanity on 
earth cannot reflect perfectly the divine image till 
the spiritual in humanity receives its full develop- 
ment. That is profoundly true and would be acknowl- 
edged by most. It is equally true that humanity on 
earth cannot reflect the divine image till the mental 
and physical receive their full development, not sub- 
ordinately but concurrently. The ideal business life is 
that which is governed by the high conception that its 
activities are beneficial, not simply to the individual, 
but to his fellows, that every contract executed and 
every bale of goods sold is a positive service to human- 
ity, and that in the grand summing-up of things the 
work of the man of business will stand side by side 
with that of the scientist and the statesman, the teacher 
and the minister of religion, each having a part, and 
an indispensable part, in the consummation of the 



THE CHURCH AND BUSINESS. 93 

divine plan. If this conception could become the rec- 
ognized ideal of business life we should find less to 
complain of in business methods, we should have less 
difficulty in putting a stop to objectionable kinds of 
business, and we should hear no more foolish talk 
about the incompatibility of Christian character and 
business success. 

The Church can do a great deal toward securing a 
general recognition of this ideal. Its first step ought 
to be the clearing of its own skirts of certain reproaches. 
Reforms, like charity, begin at home. The best friends 
of the Church feel compelled at times to become its 
unsparing critics, not because they desire to lend com- 
fort to its enemies or strength to their cavillings, but 
because they feel that the leader of men should keep 
in advance of the mass and should have the least 
possible share in the wrongs it seeks to right. The 
morality of business is sometimes none too strict, and 
the Church does wrong in ignoring or tolerating the 
too frequent existence of abuses which are an offence 
even to ordinary commercial ethics. Everybody's busi- 
ness is nobody's business, and the loose management 
of money matters in some parishes, arising from the 
incompetence of officers and the indifference of mem- 
bers, is a scandal and a disgrace. Dues and subscrip- 
tions are not paid promptly or collected carefully and 
so bills are not promptly met. Debts are contracted 
recklessly and paid slowly, if at all. Houses of wor- 
ship are built when no man knows how they are ever 
to be paid for. Salaries are not promptly paid and 
the minister is sometimes forced to the unnecessary 
and undignified expedient of himself collecting the 



94 THE CHURCH AND BUSINESS. 

funds that are to pay his salary. One of the most 
reprehensible of all such practices is the not uncom- 
mon one of engaging the minister with the promise of 
a salary larger than the parish has ever paid or been 
able to pay, and then expecting him to increase the 
revenue in some way so that the obligation can be 
met. Again, parishes do not insist as they ought on 
the strict business integrity of clergymen. Clergymen 
as a class are honest, but some are unfortunately lack- 
ing in the first elements of a business training, others, 
and some of the best, are financially careless and 
incompetent, many are underpaid, and a few are reck- 
lessly extravagant. As a consequence, they incur lia- 
bilities which they cannot meet and die or change their 
charges leaving a mass of unpaid bills behind them. 
Ministers ought to be properly supported, and then 
held to the strictest discharge of their financial obli- 
gations. Failing such discharge, they should be de- 
graded from the ministry. If a minister fails to pay 
his just debts, the offence is too often covered up or 
condoned. If he fails in loyalty to some opinion writ 
down in the creed, he is tried and censured or excom- 
municated. The Church would do better to condone 
the heresy and punish the dishonesty. 

If the Church desires that the world should recog- 
nize the sanctity of business, it must begin by itself 
recognizing it and teaching it. It would not perhaps 
be wise, even if it were possible, to abolish entirely 
the distinction between sacred and secular things, but 
it is of the last importance that that distinction should 
not be held in such wise as to cause us to lose sight 
of the sacred side that there is in all secular things. 



THE CHURCH AND BUSINESS. 95 

The Church, or rather the hierarchy that has legis- 
lated for the Church and has assumed to be the 
Church, has been too ready to draw and to magnify 
this distinction. It has magnified its office, and has 
sought to magnify it the more by the belittling of 
other ministries. It has taught the inferiority of all 
other ministries to its own, even if it has not gone so 
far as to deny that there are other ministries. It has 
set the ecclesiastic above the layman and has done its 
best to hold him there, and as a result has lost a large 
part of its hold on life and raised rebellion against its 
authority over the general life of humanity. Should 
it now wonder that men accept the distinctions thus 
impressed upon them? After having for centuries 
enforced the separation of the Church and the world, 
ought it now to wonder that the world calls to it to 
go its own separate way and leave others to theirs ? 
The Church must step down from its pinnacle of 
exclusiveness. It is, and must claim to be, the leader 
of men and the inspirer of their activities, but it must 
lead like an elder brother and not like a tyrant. 

The great business of the Church is always to inter- 
pret to men the facts of nature and of life and the 
possibilities and opportunities of humanity. In this 
special instance its great business is to interpret the 
true meanings of business to business men. The great 
need of humanity is not initiation into the unfamiliar, 
it is the interpretation of the familiar. Man is sur- 
rounded always by a complex of phenomena. In his 
first savage state he does not know what they signify, 
what relations they bear to each other and to him, 
what lesson of warning or of exhortation they con- 



96 THE CHURCH AKD BUSINESS. 

tain, what vistas of possibility they open before him. 
He is like a child in a great library, with the mental 
opulence of the world before him, but utterly useless 
to him till he shall have learned how to interpret the 
printed pages. The advance of man consists largely, 
if not wholly, of the acquisition of power to interpret 
the things without and within him. The scientist 
teaches him how to interpret nature, to understand 
the relations of its varied phenomena, to comprehend 
its moods, to seize upon its laws, to forecast its action, 
and so to make it his servant. The historian teaches 
him to interpret the records of the past deeds and the 
past thoughts of men and the results of their deeds 
and their thoughts so that he may have wisdom for 
the present and make wise and proper combinations 
for the future. Gradually he has his own organism, 
bodily, mental, and spiritual, interpreted to him. He 
learns what he can do, what he can acquire, what he 
can be. He learns the laws that govern the universe 
and the laws of his own being. He gets conception 
of his own humanity, of the divine source of all life, 
of those personal relations to the human and to the 
divine which we call duty. These conceptions grow 
with his growth. As his power and grasp enlarge 
and strengthen, his interpretations and applications of 
them enlarge also. The content of the old idea be- 
comes constantly larger and richer by the growing 
consciousness of its enlarging application and by 
the new meanings which the years put into it. At 
the head of all these interpreting agencies stands the 
Church of God, religion, if you please. It interprets 
all things in their relation to the highest that is in 



THE CHURCH AND BUSINESS. 97 

humanity and in their relation to the divine that is 
both in and over humanity. It shows man the mean- 
ing of his powers, his aspirations, his longings, and his 
sympathies. It shows him how all the activities of 
his life may be turned and should be turned to the 
accomplishment and the fulfilment of these things. 
It is not suf&cient that some great fact or law should 
be discovered, shown to man as the interpreted mean- 
ing of the facts that surround him. This law, in turn, 
needs interpretation in life and conduct. It was a 
great day for humanity when a gifted soul interpreted 
all the meanings of nature and revelation combined in 
the phrase " God is love." But that distant day when 
humanity shall have begun to interpret the full mean- 
ings of that tremendous phrase and to perceive their 
far-reaching applications to daily life will exceed it in 
glory by as much as the blazing light of the noonday 
sun exceeds the pale glimmer of some far-off star. 

The occupations of men are sordid, and they are 
sordid in them, in proportion as these occupations 
have not been interpreted to them in their higher and 
larger relations. Who has attempted to measure the 
opportunities, responsibilities, and importance of the 
man who stands at the head of some large business of 
production or exchange ? His position is important 
to him as a source of wealth, — alas for him if his 
thought of it ends there. He must have an army of 
helpers and work-people. Upon this business enter- 
prise and its relation to them depend not merely their 
livelihood, but in a very large degree their mental and 
moral condition as well. But these things, the physi- 
cal, mental, and moral condition of individuals, are, in 

H 



98 THE CHURCH AND BUSINESS. 

turn, tlie factors that go to make up the prosperity, or 
the reverse, of the community. The business of the 
mill or the store, again, is possible only because it 
ministers to some real need of humanity. The head 
of a great business is not there simply because he 
wants money, but because the great human family has 
a need which he can supply and the failure of whose 
supply means the stopping in some measure of the 
advancing wheels of progress. The influence of every 
cotton-mill on the Blackstone Eiver, of every shop in 
these neighboring communities, is as broad as human- 
ity and as long as time. The Church should show 
these business men the large importance of their work. 
It should show them the momentous issues of their 
work. It should show them the vast helpfulness, both 
actual and possible, of their work. It should show them 
that the real end of that work is not the making of 
money or the securing of. individual advantage, but 
the general advancement of the race. In this way 
men could be inspired and business lifted to planes it 
has not yet reached. It is easier and better to raise 
men by inspiring and encouraging them than by 
threatening and dragging them. Let a man believe 
that his work is ignoble and selfish and he will do it 
ignobly and selfishly. Show him that it is noble and 
he will do it nobly. This recognition of oneness of 
aim among the different manifestations of human ac- 
tivity, when held by the Church and impressed by its 
teachings, not only inspires human effort with new 
power but furnishes that vantage-ground of sympathy 
from which alone the Church can successfully do its 
work of governing human life. The Church can never 



THE CHURCH AND BUSINESS. 99 

impress the ethics of Christianity upon business so 
long as the world of religion and the world of busi- 
ness are held absolutely and radically distinct. It is 
altogether too common for men to keep their religion 
and their business so far distinct that, though they 
may be prominent in both, the ethics of the one have 
very little place in the conduct of the other. As long 
as the radical separation remains, it is comparatively 
useless to insist on a different course. But when you 
have abolished that radical separation and shown men 
that their religious and secular activities really have 
regard to the same general ends, your position is incal- 
culably strengthened. You may with perfect consis- 
tency insist that they shall have but one code of ethics, 
and they cannot, without gross inconsistency, dispute 
the claim. 

The true place and importance of business once 
recognized it becomes easier to teach and enforce a 
sound business ethics as regards kinds of business 
and methods of conducting business. Men have long 
attached a sanctity and importance to the office of the 
Christian ministry, and so certain things have come to 
be regarded by common consent as inconsistent with 
the moral level of that office and are kept away from 
it. So also people have come to have a high regard 
for the office of the educator and to demand more from 
him in the way of personal purity and uprightness 
because of that regard for his position. We are 
coming to hold a higher estimate of the position and 
the responsibility of high public office, and there is an 
increasing tendency to demand of incumbents and 
candidates a degree of personal righteousness which 



loo THE CHUECH AND BUSLN^ESS. 

past generations never thought of asking. On the 
other hand, the minister of the gospel derives much 
of his inspiration and much of his reward from the 
thought that he has the blessed privilege of helping 
and comforting, teaching and leading, his brethren. 
The educator is actuated by a sense of the high impor- 
tance of his office even more than by the thirst for 
knowledge and the desire for personal profit. The 
statesman enjoys power and place, but he finds his 
highest and most potent inspiration in the thought 
that he is serving the country he loves. It is the 
perception of the value and importance of their work 
that has raised these occupations from the level of 
mere money getting, or as the thoughtless would say 
in innocent betrayal of the common false conception, 
from the level of mere business, to the places they 
now hold. Inspire business with the same conception 
of itself and give it the same recognition, and a similar 
transformation must follow. No man impressed with 
the idea that business was really a divine ministry for 
the good of men would be willing to engage in any 
harmful form of it, nor would such a form be tolerated 
in communities inspired by the same high conception. 
No man who had learned to consider the ordinary 
operations of production and exchange as helpful to 
humanity and himself as humanity's helper while en- 
gaged in them would stoop to the meannesses and the 
tricks which have stained the honor of business. He 
would strive to conduct his little share of the world's 
business with strictest regard to the rights and the 
interests of others, and the extension of such ideas 
would soon result in the immeasurable betterment of 



THE CHUECH AND BUSINESS. 101 

the relations between man and man in this great field 
of human activity. Indeed we are touching here the 
very crux of the burning " labor question," a question 
too great for discussion here and so reserved for dis- 
cussion, at least in its relation to the Church, at 
another time. 

Above all, the work that the Church can do as an 
organization, is the work its members can do as indi- 
viduals. The example of one business man practising 
a pure and lofty Christian morality in every detail of 
his business is worth more than the preaching of an 
army of ministers telling how it ought to be done. 
The preacher can argue that the true ends of a busi- 
ness life are realized by the Christian merchant, but 
it remains for the Christian merchant to prove it. 
The essayist may set forth the advantages of better 
relations between the employer and the employed 
with captivating rhetoric and compelling logic, but 
it remains a theory. These advantages become real 
facts, only when some noble and enlightened man 
shows them in the conduct of his own business. The 
student speculates as he will about the far-reaching 
influence and vast opportunities of the business lead- 
ers of the world. The wise and strong and upright 
men of affairs have shown something of that influence, 
and risen to the level of some of those opportunities. 
As in the great things so in the less. Men longed 
for ages for a better life and hoped for ages for 
immortality, and for ages they reasoned and specu- 
lated about both, but the Christ brought both into the 
light of assurance by a concrete example. Life is 
always worth more than words, and nowhere is this 
more true than in business. 



102 THE CHURCH AND BUSINESS. 

The Master told tlie disciples to pray the Lord of 
the harvest to send forth more reapers. Are we not 
sometimes too anxious to have them all sent into one 
field ? The world stands sorely in need to-day of 
good^ sound, saving Christian work. It needs conse- 
crated men and women who shall go ont and do God's 
work. It needs wise and strong ministers. It still 
more needs wise and strong and consecrated laymen; 
needs not that they should attempt to do the work of 
the ministry, but that they should do better than it 
has yet been done the work that God has put into 
their hands right where they are. Many a member 
of the Christian Church is longing for broader oppor- 
tunity to do God's work. Circumstances have pre- 
vented his occupying a pulpit, he has neither time nor 
ability to teach a class in Sunday-school or mission, 
his means restrict him to small giving, his business 
occupies his time, and he may not even be able to 
attend the public services of the Church with the reg- 
ularity he would like. For such a man there is great 
opportunity to do God service right in that occupa- 
tion which so often seems to him to tie his hands. 
Let him feel the dignity of his own calling, and then 
let him prosecute that calling in a spirit and manner 
worthy of its dignity, and he will be serving God and 
helping his fellow-men in just that place where to-day 
service and helpfulness are most needed. On the other 
hand, there are many who feel that they are not espe- 
cially doing God service and cannot do so. They are 
not in the Church and they keep away from it. They 
have no time nor inclination for what is ordinarily 
termed Church work. They are not fond of listening 



THE CHURCH AND BUSINESS. 103 

to preaching, they do not feel the spiritual need of 
worship, they do not care to try any kind of teaching. 
They are good-hearted, interested in the advancement 
of the race, desirous of urging on all needed reforms, 
and perfectly ready to hire seats in church for their 
wives and children to occupy. Is it not possible to 
show such men the high ends and the divine possibil- 
ities of all human life, and of every human activity ? 
Is it not possible to show them that God's service 
is not confined to the meeting-house and the school, 
the hospital and the charity visitation, but is to be 
found in field and factory, counting-room and shop as 
well ? Can they not be brought into closer personal 
sympathy with the Church, by showing them that its 
aims embrace the highest ideals of all humanity, and 
its methods are as broad as the race and as varied as 
its possible activities ? Who can doubt that if this 
were done a long step would have been taken toward 
making the relations between man and man such as 
should exist between members of the same great 
family, sons of the one great and holy God? 



V. 

THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 

We are told that on one occasion while Jesus was 
addressing the multitudes who crowded around him a 
certain man asked him to speak to his brother and 
command that he divide the inheritance with him. 
The instant reply was, " Man, who made me a judge or 
a divider over you ? " It may be fairly presumed that 
the man thus answered went his way fully convinced 
of the uselessness and inadequacy of this new teaching 
which professed to set up the kingdom of God in the 
world and yet refused to interfere to secure for him 
his invaded right to a part of the family fortune. 

The conditions of this little incident are being re- 
peated at the present time on a large scale. The 
Church is trying to continue its Founder's work of 
teaching the multitudes the way of life and establish- 
ing and strengthening the kingdom of God on earth. 
Out of the multitudes come the voices of all those 
who have grievances against their brethren asking, 
nay, demanding, that the Church speak with the voice 
of authority and insist that the grievances be done 

104 



THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 105 

away and the disputes settled according to the views 
of the appellant- Because the Church claims to be 
the leader of humanity and the director of its life and 
thought, the demand is made that it assume the posi- 
tion of judge and divider. One of the principal counts 
in the present indictment against the Church is that 
it does not do the very thing which its Founder, not 
once only but many times, refused to do. Because 
it will not engage directly in the disputes of men, 
because it will not attempt to interpose with all the 
weight of its authority to settle to the advantage of 
one side or the other the differences which divide them, 
they cry out against it in their disappointment as self- 
convicted of superannuated incompetence. This dis- 
position to be impatient of an apparent indifference is 
not greatly to be wondered at, nor is it to be contempt- 
uously spurned by the friends of the Church as hasty 
and superficial. That it is both hasty and superficial 
is the fact, but it is far wiser and juster to accept 
haste and superficiality as facts, deal with them kindly 
and justly, and set them right if possible, than to ig- 
nore or denounce them and so widen the original breach 
past healing.. It is both natural and reasonable that 
a man who has a grievance should appeal to the leader 
of men for redress, that he should have very definite 
ideas as to the form that redress should take, and that 
he should be both disappointed and angry when he 
finds that form of redress denied him. 

Much of this feeling of disappointment and anger 
marks the relation of the leaders in the labor move- 
ment to the Church. The most burning of present 
burning social questions is what is rather loosely 



106 THE CHUECH AND LABOR. 

termed th.e " labor question." It is the same old trouble 
whicli the man brought to Jesus. The man who earns 
his bread by the labor of his hands feels that his 
brother has possessed himself unjustly, perhaps vio- 
lently, of the family estate and refuses to make equi- 
table division of it. He feels that his lawful rights 
are granted only most grudgingly if at all. Are we to 
blame him if his voice is not always as smooth and 
his temper as sweet as we would like them to be ? 
He hears the Church preach of love, of justice, of 
brotherhood. He turns to it and repeats in terms the 
old demand, " Speak to my brother that he divide the 
inheritance with me." He desires that his demand 
shall be made, and made in his own way, upon his 
brother through the lips of their common mother. 
He is so fully convinced of the righteousness and the 
justice of his own cause that he cannot see how a 
righteous and just Church can hesitate to commit 
itself fully to that cause. It seems to him that every 
pulpit should ring with the laborer's demands and 
thunder with righteous indignation at their refusal. 
It seems to him that the Church and the Union ought 
to work side by side on the same platform. If the 
Church will not take that position, then for him it has 
no message, to him it seems to have no mission to the 
men of to-day. There are few men prominent in labor 
agitation who feel that the Church or its teachings 
have any vital interest for them. Many are utterly 
indifferent to it, some contemptuously characterize it 
as a "rich man's club," a few are positively hostile 
to it and labor for its overthrow, regarding it as 
a positive and important obstacle to their success. 



THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 107 

These more positive conditions of opposition are more 
common in other countries than in this, but even here 
it is very commonly said, and apparently not without 
foundation in truth, that the Church is losing its 
hold on the men of the laboring classes, because they 
cannot see its use to them. On the other hand, the 
other brother, the employer of labor, whose interests 
are so often and so wrongly supposed to be antago- 
nistic to those of the laborer, feels sometimes as if 
he would like to ask the Church to speak to his 
brother to cease his importunate demands and content 
himself with the portion of goods that is his already. 
At most he is likely to stand very firm in the opinion 
that these things are entirely outside the proper 
ken of Church and clergy. He goes to Church to 
have his soul cared for, his business he will care for 
himself. Let the Church and the clergy take care of 
the souls of the workmen and give them and their 
children food and medicine and blankets if they please, 
but their political, social and industrial relations are 
matters to be left to others for settlement. Hands 
off there ! is the cry, or, if you must interfere, inter- 
fere to prevent the disorders which are so hurtful and 
so annoying. 

Certain questions present themselves at once. 
Ought the Church to take sides, definitely and as 
an organization, in this dispute ? Jesus did not, in- 
deed, but the times have changed and duties some- 
times change with them. Perhaps the justice of the 
case may be made clearly to appear all on one side. 
May not changed conditions properly cause a change 
of policy ? Should the answer to the first question be 



108 THE CHUKCH AKD LABOR. 

determined by policy ? Should the fear of losing sup- 
port, or the higher consideration of possible loss of 
influence, decide the matter on considerations of ap- 
parent expediency, or is there some higher and deeper 
principle to be invoked? If the Church steadily 
refuses to be judge and divider, is the inference either 
just or necessary that it has no message for the dis- 
putants, or for either of them ? Does the refusal to 
enter directly the arena of strife carry the confession 
or the implication that the Church has nothing to say 
as to the outcome, and no help for the combatants ? 
If that be the case, and the Church has no word for 
this need, then the ministry of Jesus must be adjudged 
a failure. There must have been at least one man in 
sore need of help for whom he had no message, and if 
there was a single man for whom, in any possible need, 
Jesus had no message and no help, then he was not he 
that should come and we must look for another. If 
there be any human question or human need which is 
beyond solution or relief by the Church of Christ the 
contention of the positivist is true, the Church has out- 
lived its usefulness and humanity must find another 
leader. The statement of this alternative in its barest 
form is neither impiety nor infidelity. There is no 
unfaith so dangerous as that which dares not put the 
Church and its message to the most searching tests. 
The dangerous infidel is not he who tries all things, 
but he who has not enough faith in his religion to put 
it on trial. The Church can afford to face and to 
court the strictest inquiry. It cannot afford to deny 
any inquiry or to denounce any honest inquirer. 

Before we can properly discuss the relations of the 



THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 109 

Church to the labor question, or to any question, we 
must get some clear conception of the question itself, 
its nature and its origin. This term, the " labor ques- 
tion," has been used more or less loosely to cover almost 
all class antagonism. The labor question, as it is often 
presented, is a question of many more or less unsatis- 
factory social relations, some industrial and some polit- 
ical. It is partly a natural question arising out of 
positive wrong and injustice in social relations, and 
partly an artificial question raised by the assiduous 
efforts of interested individuals. If we reduce it to its 
lowest terms, we shall find no great difficulty in getting 
at its nature and origin. We may begin by striking 
out agitation which is the result of individual political 
ambition and reckless or wicked demagoguery. Unfor- 
tunately, these are very frequent causes of disturbances 
which are falsely called labor agitations. There are 
many men who aspire to gain by devious roads the 
power and place which they could never reach legiti- 
mately. They are quick to see the political strength 
of mere numbers, adroit to play upon every human 
weakness, unscrupulous in the exciting of passion and 
the sowing of discord. These men, in the name of the 
interests of humanity and the rights of classes, keep 
up an agitation which is purely selfish in its ends and 
has no real relation whatever to the questions at issue 
between the laborer and his employers. Like the 
stormy petrel they love the tempest, and they love it 
because they see chance for good fishing in the troubled 
waters. Many fancied grievances, many deep-rooted 
prejudices, many revengeful desires which delay the 
needed settlement of open questions are largely trace- 



110 THE CHUUCH AND LABOR. 

able to the pernicious activity of such people. There 
is, again, much agitation sheltered behind the honest 
name of labor that is really only criminal lawlessness. 
All labor movements partake more or less of the nature 
of protests against existing laws, institutions, or cus- 
toms. Those men to whom all law is irksome and 
hateful, who regard the restraints of civilized society 
as other criminals regard the sheriff and the judge, 
eagerly foist themselves and their evil aims on such 
protests, hoping, no doubt, to inflame the protestants 
against all laws and all institutions and to make the 
righting of one wrong the entering-place of the wedge 
that shall rive asunder all law and all social restraints. 
There are a few Anarchists who are honest but mis- 
taken enthusiasts, there are some who are innocent 
but misled, but there are vastly more who are simply 
criminal. Their hands are against the law because 
they hate it and fear it. They would shatter society 
in order that they may live in the unrestrained brutal- 
ity of the savage. Whenever and wherever there is 
industrial unrest or discontent, these men make their 
appearance. Only too often, as recent experience 
proves, it is they who get up the labor demonstrations ; 
they who lead the processions of the unemployed ; they 
who address the meetings of the out-of-works, while 
the real laborer bears his troubles in patient silence. 

There is much agitation of so-called labor questions 
which is neither aimed at the redress of actual wrongs 
nor based on real injustice of conditions. It is simply 
the clamor of those who are not satisfied because their 
means will not permit unlimited self-indulgence and 
because they feel as oppressive the weight of the benef- 



THE CHURCH AND LABOR. Ill 

icent natural law of labor. They would like to have 
means to satisfy not merely their needs but their 
desires. It seems to them that if they had the means 
which they see in the possession of others they could 
do so, and straightway they perceive an injustice and 
an oppression. They forget that with increasing means 
come always increasing desires and that the demon of 
self-indulgence, when once unchained, is absolutely in- 
satiable. They forget also that a man's desires are no 
just measure of his rights. We should all, perhaps, 
like to live without the necessity of labor, and it is 
always a pleasant thing to most men to get something 
for nothing. But the agitation which simply aims to 
bring about such results as these; to shorten labor 
while lengthening wages ; to take from one class while 
giving to another ; to provide that a man shall receive 
much from society while rendering back to it little or 
nothing, — that is certainly neither the righting of 
wrongs nor the asserting of rights. 

Let it not be for an instant supposed that there is 
the slightest intention to accuse the true labor move- 
ment or its leaders of such motives or of such prac- 
tices. These are the things which have falsely and 
impudently attached themselves to the labor move- 
ment. These are the things which deserve the impar- 
tial condemnation of all good men, the barnacles that 
have fouled a good cause. But after all the demagoguery 
and all the criminality and all the self-indulgence and all 
the laziness and all the other things that are false and 
mean have been stripped off, there still remains a true 
labor question. All over the world, and as the Church 
is world-wide so the view taken of these great ques- 



112 THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 

tions should be world-wide, there is a real grievance, a 
real injustice in the distribution of the common heri- 
tage of humanity. In many countries there are class 
distinctions imbedded in custom and sanctioned by 
law which are unjust and oppressive in the extreme. 
Certain privileges are reserved for certain classes and 
the laborer, who really pays for everything, is rigor- 
ously confined to his fixed place. Classes have mo- 
nopolized everything of value, from land and other 
means of production to social and educational privi- 
leges. Social and industrial conditions which are the 
heritage of an ignorant, selfish and violent past are 
often so framed as to oppress one class and favor 
another. It would seem sometimes as though the 
feudal law of primogeniture had been impressed on 
the relations of the whole family of mankind, the 
eldest brother getting about everything, the younger 
ones little or nothing. Out of these injustices arise 
protests, struggle, bitterness, vindictiveness. One side 
feels that the conditions established through so many 
years are its rights and defends them with all the 
vigor of superior position, intelligence and opportu- 
nity. The other feels that these conditions are all 
wrong and attacks them with all the violence roused 
by a feeling of abuse and injustice. Each side is in- 
tent upon its own victory, and in the struggle the prin- 
ciples of justice are very liable to be lost sight of. The 
average labor reformer promises himself nothing less 
than a complete reversal of the existing conditions. For 
generations Dives has sat at the table and Lazarus lain 
at the gate. He means that Lazarus shall mount into 
the seat of Dives and Dives sit among the dogs. What 



THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 113 

he desires is not so mucli the abolition of class dis- 
tinctions as the supremacy of his own class. He has 
come to regard the capitalist class as his natural and 
hereditary enemies and to regard their abasement as 
the end and object of his life. On the other hand, the 
class which has social preponderance everywhere and 
in so many places still retains control of the law-mak- 
ing and law-executing powers is bent upon maintain- 
ing that supremacy at any and every cost. 

It is very probable that many, perhaps most, people 
would be inclined, at least at first, to dissent from 
the estimates here presented. According as their own 
sympathies were inclined, they would probably regard 
them as unjust to either one side or the other. But 
it is to be remembered that strife is not pleasant and 
that it is not a developer of the finer feelings even, 
among those who fight in a righteous cause. The ex- 
istence of an original injustice is freely admitted. To 
that degree, as concerns the original question, the 
labor reformer is in the right. He is all the more in 
the right because that injustice was originally the 
work of a more powerful and more intelligent class 
and the present representatives of that class are not 
as ready as they should be either to acknowledge or 
to redress the original injury. But in its prosecution 
the quarrel arising out of this injustice has been 
marked, like all quarrels, by violence and injustice on 
both sides, and the aroused passions of the disputants, 
as always, have far outrun the original matters in dis- 
pute. As might be expected, the greater violence has 
been shown by the attack. The circumstances make 
that inevitable. Stone walls are not to be battered 



114 THE CHUECH AKD LABOR. 

down with snowballs. Generations of social and 
political inferiority do not cultivate the finest deli- 
cacy of feeling or develop the highest polish of man- 
ner. Neither the violences nor the extravagances of 
labor agitations ought to be judged too harshly, though 
they sometimes have to be dealt with sternly. We 
rejoice in the French Ee volution and we recognize its 
fundamental justice, though we shudder at the Terror 
and applaud Napoleon's stern cannonading of the 
Parisian mob. On the other hand, this violence of 
attack has often been met by a stolid and exasperat- 
ing selfishness and sometimes by a cold and indiffer- 
ent tyranny which are utterly indefensible. In only 
too many cases the welfare of human beings has been 
counted as the small dust of the balance when profits 
were in danger. This tyranny has been none the less 
real and none the less iniquitous because it has been 
conducted without resort to actual violence and under 
color of the forms of law. 

A study of the conditions and history of the con- 
tention shows that it was born in greed and has been 
nourished by selfishness and hate. The rich and pow- 
erful in the old days seized and kept the heritage of 
the whole family. They claimed such privileges as 
they desired for their own selfish gratification, guar- 
anteed them by laws of their own making, and defended 
them with all the resources of their usurped position. 
The others, seeking originally only to recover that 
which had been taken away from them, have been led 
by their own selfish desires to seek to possess them- 
selves of everything. No settlement is acceptable to 
them which is not wholly in their favor j no attitude 



THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 115 

of spectator or critic is tolerated except it be one of 
unswerving support of their side. No matter how- 
true or really helpful a friend of labor reform such a 
person may be, he is denounced and abused by the 
labor leaders if he refuse to follow them to all the 
lengths they have gone or purpose to go. Does this 
statement appear harsh ? How many promising at- 
tempts at co-operation have been wrecked on this rock 
of selfishness ! Profit-sharing is well enough, but loss- 
sharing is another matter. As long as there is extra 
money in the process, all goes well ; when there are 
losses, and reductions come, then there is trouble. The 
practical demand of the Union generally is that the 
employer shall take all the risk of loss and give 
the employe all the advantage of profit. The Unions 
demand that their members shall receive the highest 
current rates of wages and shall be given precedence 
over all others in securing employment, but how many 
Unions stand ready to guarantee that the service ren- 
dered by their members shall always be the best in the 
market, and so preferable to that of outsiders ? With 
what face, then, can the Unions claim the countenance 
and support of an institution which stands for absolute 
equity in the relations between man and man, while 
refusing or neglecting to do away with this essential 
injustice in their own dealings ? How many times has 
it been shown that the man who comes up from the 
ranks is the hardest task-master when once he gets 
into the seat of authority ! The tyranny of capital 
has often been harsh and grinding. It has driven hard 
bargains and enforced its own chosen conditions upon 
the laborer. Its shortcomings are neither to be denied 



116 THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 

nor condoned. But capital has never yet exercised a 
tyranny so selfish, so unjust, or so ferocious as that 
which the Trades-Unions have again and again exer- 
cised when they have been in condition to enforce 
their demands. Trades-unionism, fighting in the name 
of the emancipation of labor, draws around itself the 
circle of its own selfish appropriation of advantages, 
and denies to other than its members the right either 
to work or to join the Union. It forbids the appren- 
tice system, shuts out recruits from its own ranks, 
forbids the employment of non-union men, fixes hours 
and wages to suit itself, and then calmly tells the 
laborers outside its own body that they may go and 
starve for all it cares. These things are patent to 
everybody, and in the face of them shall we say that 
this selfish attempt to appropriate advantage and op- 
portunity is morally any better defensible than the 
more ancient abuses of similar appropriations by an- 
other class ? 

To the impartial observer of such a contest one 
thing at least must be clearly evident. It can never 
be settled by the victory of one side over the other. 
It can only be settled by some process that shall pene- 
trate deeper than that. If Trades-unionism could 
triumph everywhere to-day, the old quarrel would still 
remain in a new form. The old injustices would be 
there, the old hates would remain, the old struggle 
would sooner or later break out again. The injustices 
of class rule are not to be remedied by the substitution 
of one class for another. The Church is called upon 
in the name of justice to interfere and settle the quarrel 
in the interest of the side originally oppressed. It is 



THE CHUECH AND LABOR. 117 

hardly probable that its intervention could ever be 
made decisive, but let us concede, so as to allow the 
case against it its greatest possible weight, that it 
would be so. The Church is censured because it re- 
fuses so to interfere. Its interference would not work 
justice, nor would it really settle the controversy. It 
would only give victory to one party, and such a vic- 
tory, in the nature of things, could only be temporary. 
The burden of injustice shifted, the cry of the oppressed 
for justice would rise once more to the ears of the 
Church. The old question would be reopened and 
further attempts to settle it would have to be given 
up, or the Church must pose as a shifting make- 
weight in a perpetual see-saw. If the Church were to 
take the position demanded, identify itself with the 
cause of organized labor, and so secure the victory of 
that cause, it would only make confusion worse con- 
founded. A Church that was a laborer's union would 
be as unjust, as evil, as productive of mischief, as one 
that was a rich man's club. 

The business of the Church with the labor question 
is higher than partisanship, and any descent to parti- 
sanship would inevitably destroy its power for good as 
regards the final settlement. The Church has work 
of help, instruction and admonition to be done equally 
with both the capitalist and the laborer. The key to 
the whole problem lies in the one word "character." 
Faults of human character originated it, faults of 
human character have made the errors which have 
disfigured and obstructed the methods so far used for 
its solution, and only by the removal of those faults 
can it be finally solved. No method that has yet been 



118 THE CHUECH AKD LABOKo 

suggested outside the methods of the Church has 
promised much for final success, because none have 
been searching enough. Probably the wisest word 
that has yet been spoken on the subject of labor 
troubles and the relief possible under existing social 
conditions, is the " Eeport of the Royal Commission on 
Strikes in New South Wales," made public in the year 
1891. The Commission was composed equally of 
representatives of labor and of employers of labor, 
worked for six months, examined a great number of 
witnesses, studied extensively the legislation of the 
world on the subject and the large literature bearing 
upon it, and finally presented a report, every section 
of which received the unanimous endorsement of the 
Commission. The remedy they propose, to wdiich 
further reference will be made later, seems both wise 
and Christian, at least in principle, but they themselves 
do not claim that it can reach the most important 
cause of disagreement or settle troubles rising out of 
it. The disagreements that arise over pay, hours, 
privileges, etc., are comparatively simple, but when 
the question is between the Union, with its claims for 
official recognition and its large, self -assumed authority, 
on the one side and the right of free contract on the 
other, a condition is presented before which even this 
strong, intelligent, and representative Commission folds 
its hands in despair. It can only hope that the soft- 
ening influences of its remedy in cases where it can be 
applied will so moderate antagonisms and dissolve 
prejudices that these contests may become less fre- 
quent and less bitter. In other words, it hopes to 
mitigate them indirectly through the incidental im- 
provement of character. 



THE CHUECH AND LABOR. 119 

All sorts of expedients have been proposed having 
to do with social forms and with the environment of 
the individual. The ingenuity of man has been ex- 
hausted in efforts to create Utopias where the condi- 
tions of life should be such as to do away with all 
friction and avoid all injustice. They all fail because 
they do not take sufficient account of that personality 
which is the determining factor in all human relations. 
When men have become righteous, their relations will 
become just and equitable, but not before that. As 
long as men continue to be self-seeking, swayed by 
passions and led by ambitions, lovers of self rather 
than of God, neighbor and righteousness, it will be 
absolutely impossible to devise any state of society in 
which there shall not be frictions and quarrels, hates 
and injustices. One of the oldest, most persistent, 
and most mischievous of human errors is the notion 
that the righteousness of men and the purity of 
society can be brought about by altering the external 
conditions of life. There can be no doubt that there 
is reaction here as well as action. The prevailing 
conditions of a given time or place may be very unfa- 
vorable to righteousness and so may affect individuals 
unfavorably, but, after all, a careful, comprehensive, 
and intelligent study of the facts must make it evi- 
dent that the one potent agency in all human affairs 
is personality. The conditions of a given time or 
place are the manifestation and expression of the per- 
sonality there prevalent. If widely different con- 
ditions are imposed upon an unchanged personality, 
they will be evaded, broken, defied. In some way or 
another the personality that is there will manage to 



120 THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 

assert itself and to assert itself effectually. If, on 
the other hand, that personality can be changed, its 
manifestations must come to agree with its changed 
nature. It is the old parable of the tree and its fruit. 
The old Hebrew poet was wise in judgment and keen 
beyond his age in insight when he prayed Jehovah to 
give him a new, clean heart. The sources of life once 
purified, he had no fears for the stream that should 
flow thence. The modern social reformer, his head 
full of theories, his heart full of appetites, passions 
and desires, busies himself with the conditions that 
surround life. Christ, the greatest social reformer 
the world has ever seen, to whose teachings and influ- 
ence we owe all that is really and permanently valu- 
able in the nineteenth century civilization, did not 
identify himself directly with any of the existing 
movements to change the conditions of life, nor did 
he set on foot any new movements of such character, 
but he bent his energies to the betterment of life 
itself. Which is the wiser ? Let history answer. 
Who has done the more for the betterment of the 
every-day conditions of human life, the Platos, the 
Mores and the Bellamys, or the Nazarene ? 

The Church cannot solve the labor question by 
championing one of the parties to it, but the labor 
question can never be solved except by the aid of just 
the principles which the Church exists to teach and 
defend. It is the business of the Christian Church to 
develop manhood, and exactly as manhood is developed 
among men will those abuses which arise from defec- 
tive manhood disappear. If any organization or in- 
strumentality can make better manhood than Chris- 



THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 121 

tianity can make, tliat organization or instrumentality 
must supersede the Cliurcli. Till such, organization 
or instrumentality can be found, the key to the labor 
problem and to all the problems that vex the minds 
and burden the hearts of men lies in the hands of the 
Church. In spite of all extravagances and all mis- 
takes, the labor reformer is at heart seeking the 
righting of vprongs, the elevating of men, the better- 
ment of life. He is seeking these things with much 
admixture of meaner elements and with many inef- 
fectual gropings after the best way, but he is seeking 
them all the same. The Church is seeking the same 
things with the additional advantage of seeking them 
along the ways where only they may be found, the 
ways that lie through the uplifting of human charac- 
ter. Here, as elsewhere, it is true, as Jesus told the 
men of his day and generation, that the kingdom of 
God is within you. The rehabilitation of labor and 
the securing of right relations between the social and 
economic classes, the industrial kingdom of God, 
cometh not with observation. It is in the mind and 
heart of the individual, and nowhere else. Society 
can never be reorganized for the better, nor can its 
relations be ever permanently equitably adjusted till 
that reorganization and readjustment are made on the 
basis of personal and individual righteousness. 

What, then, should be the attitude of the Church as 
an organization toward the labor question as it exists 
to-day ? In the first place, it should be an attitude of 
interest. The Church should never forget that there 
is no human interest that is alien to it, no human need 
that it cannot help, no human problem that does not 



122 THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 

concern it. It can hardly be denied tliat the attitude 
of the Church has been only too often such as to lend 
color to the charge that it did not interest itself with 
the present needs and present problems of humanity. 
It has devoted itself so exclusively to the task of sav- 
ing single souls from what it considered a lost world 
that it has lost sight of other problems in what seemed 
to it the transcendent importance of that. Certainly 
man can have no higher interests than his spiritual 
ones, and yet it is possible for him to take such views 
of them and of their relations to his whole life that 
his pursuit of them shall not bring him the true spir- 
itual development which he needs. It is as true in 
the things of the spirit as in any other that he that 
seeketh his life is in danger of loss of it if his seeking 
is done in any narrow or selfish way. It is a very bad 
thing when the Church becomes worldly. It is equally 
bad when it becomes other-worldly. The Church ought 
to view and prosecute its spiritual work as affording 
the key to the solution of the problems of life, and it 
should be diligent in the application of that key. Ac- 
cording to Christ's commission to his Apostles there 
is binding and loosing to be done on earth as well as 
in heaven. 

There is a great deal of preaching which fails of its 
proper effect upon the community because, wilfully or 
otherwise, it ignores the questions which are pressing 
on the minds of men. It would probably be possible 
to find a great many churches which one might attend 
for a long period without ever learning from anything 
that was heard there that there is a labor question 
which sometimes seems to threaten the disruption of 



THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 123 

society, that there are educational questions which 
cause trouble and embarrassment to many communi- 
ties, or that there are any questions which may prop- 
erly engage the minds of Christian men and women 
except questions as to the interpretation of proof texts 
and application of creed formulas. There can be little 
doubt that the preaching which refuses or neglects to 
take any account of the questions which fill human 
thought and trouble human action is fully as bad as 
that which treats such questions with unwise parti- 
sanship. If the business of the Church is to make 
itself instrumental in the bringing in of God's king- 
dom on earth so that his will shall be done here as it 
is in heaven, it must make it its business to apply the 
gospel constantly, persistently, and courageously to 
these pressing problems of the time that now is. It 
is proper that the Church should interest itself in 
these things and that the ministry should strive to 
influence the public in regard to them. The minister 
should study these problems, he should strive to stir 
his people to intelligent interest in them, and he should 
exercise whatever power of leadership he may possess 
in the effort to help forward their settlement in accord- 
ance with those fundamental principles of right action 
which are to be found in the gospel and which alone 
can guide to a settlement that shall be final. This is 
not to say that the pulpit should be allowed to occupy 
itself solely with the sociological side of the work of 
the Church. It is not to be forgotten that the office 
of the Church is very large and that the wants of 
humanity are very varied. There are social wrongs 
to be righted, social inequalities to be abolished, social 



124 THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 

problems to be solved. But there are also struggling 
human souls bending beneath the burden of their own 
individual troubles to be helped, encouraged and com- 
forted. There are doubts to be resolved, regrets to be 
softened, tears to be dried. There are hardened souls 
to be touched, despairing souls to be stirred to new- 
life, dead souls to be quickened. There are ideals 
which must be kept distinct, aspirations which must 
be encouraged, and inspirations which must not be 
allowed to fade. All these things must be done, must 
find their places in the work of the Church and its 
ministry. All these things will help us remember 
the great truth that the Church is not and must not 
be allowed to become merely a great social club. It 
must never be forgotten that the Church is a religious 
institution and that its work is a religious work. To 
secularize it is to destroy it. To consent to its own 
secularization would be suicide. Its purposes are not 
to be accomplished by giving up its distinctive char- 
acter and stepping down to lower levels, but by main- 
taining its own place and raising other things to the 
same high level. When we say that we would largely 
efface the distinctions between the sacred and the 
secular, we do not mean that we would do it by level- 
ling down, bat by levelling up. The business of the 
Church with secular life is to make it sacred, or per- 
haps it would be more exact to say to show that it is 
sacred. So with regard to the specific problem now 
under discussion, the interest of the Church in the 
labor question can be best shown and its contribu- 
tion to its settlement best made by recognizing its 
existence and its right to our attention and by showing 



THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 125 

the bearing of the Christian principles upon its very- 
essence. 

We open thus a large field. Let us see by a few 
examples how it may be worked. In the first place, 
the Church should stand for the nobility and holiness 
of the ministry of labor. This is very far from the 
dealing in commonplace that it might at first appear 
to be. It is true that we have heard about the equality 
of men, the foolishness of class distinctions, and even 
the nobility of labor till the phrases have become 
almost meaningless in our ears, and yet it may be 
that we have something still to learn even here. 
There is room for more than a suspicion that we have 
not yet got very far beyond the idea that " a man's a 
man for a' that and a' that," the idea, that is, that 
there is a fundamental equality that should be re- 
spected in spite of the fact that the positions and 
occupations of some men are noble and the positions 
and occupations of other men are ignoble. We seem 
to have the idea that the man who is engaged in those 
occupations that are technically called labor is noble 
in spite of his work. Would we not do better, should 
we not be nearer the teaching of the gospel, if we took 
the ground not merely that the work has nothing to 
do with the matter of human nobility, but that very 
work itself, if well and faithfully done, no matter how 
humble its character, is the man's highest patent of 
nobility ? Work, manual and even menial though it 
be, is itself ennobling. The teaching of Jesus and of 
the Apostles is perfectly definite upon this matter. 
Jesus said, "My Father worketh hitherto and I work ; " 
he said that " the Son of Man came not to be ministered 



126 THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 

unto but to minister;" he said that he that would be- 
come great among the Apostles should become as a 
servant. The Apostles constantly preached the gospel 
of service. They spoke of our Lord as having taken 
the form and office of a servant, and it is worthy of 
note that the terms used of him and by him are those 
which denote the humblest forms of service. They 
insisted constantly that all work is God's work, that 
all workers should work as if for him, and that all 
service is equally honorable and equally indispensable. 
The early Church embraced on terms of absolute 
equality the slave and his master, the bond-servant of 
the humblest citizen and the noble of the imperial 
household. This equality was not based on the notion 
of an underlying essential nobility which must be rec- 
ognized, but rather on that of the inherent sanctity of 
the ministry of labor. 

As long as the Church held close to the teaching 
and the example of the Apostles that idea remained, 
but with rapid growth came the influx of worldly 
thought and that idea, like many others, lost its depth 
and power and freshness. And now we have the evil 
work of centuries to undo. The man of high station 
needs to learn that his more humble brother's occupa- 
tion is not a gulf between them which his generous 
appreciation of human worth should magnanimously 
ignore, but that that occupation is every whit as neces- 
sary and every whit as lofty in its purposes as his 
own. It is true that some must lead and some must 
follow; as it was said in the old time, all the members 
have not the same office, but it is equally true that 
the leading would be in vain without the following, 



THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 12? 

the members depend upon each other for their useful- 
ness. To be head of a great business, governor of a 
state, president of a college, is a high station. The 
welfare and the advancement of the community de- 
pend in large measure upon such men and their labors. 
To be stoker on an ocean steamer, digger in a sewer- 
trench, porter in a store, is a low position as the world 
counts such things, and yet the stoking of the boilers, 
the digging of the trenches, and the carrying of the 
burdens must be done, and the stoppage of them would 
paralyze society as quickly as the cessation of these 
higher activities. We do not always realize how 
dependent we are upon certain services, because it is 
almost always a very easy matffcer to find people who 
can render them, but the dependence is there all the 
same. All these things are parts, and indispensable 
parts, of the divine plan of the universe. The evil 
notions of centuries of wrong thinking are not con- 
fined to the minds of the richer classes merely. The 
laborer, even while he is loudest in the assertion of 
his own equality, only too often feels in the depths of 
his heart a sense of inequality which embitters thought 
and speech and action. The glitter of gold and the 
roll of carriage wheels are bright to his eyes and loud 
in his ears. He does his work under protest, not esti- 
mating it at its true value. He has been told so long 
that work is inferior to idleness that he has come to 
believe it, even though he may fight bitterly against 
owning his conviction even to himself, and in too 
many cases the result is discontent, envy and antago- 
nism. The man who really feels himself the peer of 
his fellows, whatever be his place or occupation, does 



128 THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 

not often go about proclaiming the fact or arguing the 
question. He assumes it once for all, and the matter 
needs no further discussion. We all need clearer and 
truer views of the nobility of work, of the sacredness 
of the ministry of service. We are all members one 
of another, and we all serve each other or our lives are 
useless. The valuable member of the community is 
he who serves it, whether by hand or by brain does 
not greatly signify. The useless parasites on the body 
politic are the men who do nothing to serve it ; whether 
they are beer-soaked tramps or the idle sons of rich 
men living selfishly on money which they did not earn 
does not greatly signify. 

The Church can not only do an inestimable service 
by teaching the true nobility of labor, but it can do 
another great service by bringing the different social 
classes to better knowledge of each other and closer 
acquaintance with each other. In the days of old in 
nearly or quite all the languages of the earth, the words 
for stranger and enemy were identical. The fact cov- 
ers an important psychological truth. The great source 
of enmity is unfaniiliarity. As long as men were 
strange to each other in appearance, in language, and 
in manners, they repelled and irritated each other. As 
they came to know each other better and to become 
familiar with each other's peculiarities so that the 
strangeness of them ceased to be unpleasant or ridic- 
ulous, the hostility ceased. Class antagonisms are 
largely the result of the same conditions. It is a 
familiar old saying that half the world does not know 
how the other half lives. As classes have been de- 
veloped in human society, the members of each class 



THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 129 

have drawn away from those of other classes and 
great gulfs of ignorance, prejudice and hostility have 
opened between them. They misconceive each other's 
thoughts, ways and purposes. They misunderstand 
each other in every imaginable way. Their differ- 
ences and disputes arise largely from these misunder- 
standings. The Church can do much to settle these 
disputes by acting not as an arbitrator, but as a media- 
tor and conciliator. Its mission is not to divide the 
inheritance according either to its own ideas or those 
of one or the other of the claimants, but to bring the 
claimants into such knowledge and friendship of each 
other that they can themselves agree upon a division. 
The " Eeport of the E/oyal Commission on Strikes in 
New South Wales,'^ already referred to, very acutely 
remarks that the remedy for labor disputes is not 
arbitration, but conciliation. It proposes, as the Gov- 
ernment's contribution to the settlement and preven- 
tion of these difficulties, a Board of Conciliation, which 
is also to act as a Board of Arbitration, though only 
in desperate cases. It remarks that experience shows 
that a great many labor troubles grow out of igno- 
rance, mutual misunderstanding, unfounded suspicions, 
and exaggerated alarms. The Union does not trust 
the employer, and the employer suspects the Union 
and resents its apparent fondness for interference. 
The employed do not always understand the condi- 
tions of business, and consider changes which seem 
necessary to the employer as violent invasions of 
their rights. All these things may be gotten over if 
the two parties can be induced to get together and 
talk the matter over. The great miners' strike in 



130 THE CHUECH .^T) LABOE. 

England has just been settled in tliat manner through 
the friendly offices of Lord Eosebery. He simply 
got the representatives of the interests concerned to 
meet at his house and talk the matter over in a quiet 
and friendly way, and the result was an agreement 
that was satisfactory to all concerned. The presence 
of a third party, intelligent upon the points in ques- 
tion, is of the greatest help in mitigating asperities of 
discussion and in giving both parties a chance to see 
how their claims and arguments strike impartial out- 
siders. If the parties cannot agree after full and free 
discussion, then, and not till then, is the time for ar- 
bitration. Arbitration is of the nature of judgment. 
It must imply either victory, defeat or compromise. 
The award is almost inevitably unsatisfactory to one 
party, and is very liable to be unsatisfactory to both. 
The award is very liable to settle the case only for a 
little while. The sting of defeat or the disappoint- 
ment of only partial victory remains behind. The 
justice of the award is questioned, the impartiality of 
the arbitrator is called in question, and a whole train 
of new difficulties is started. Voluntary submission 
of disputes to arbitration is difficult to secure, and 
there are very grave difficulties in the way of compul- 
sory arbitration. It has never yet been shown how 
the award of an arbitrator in a labor dispute could 
possibly be enforced by law or by constraint. A cor- 
poration can be coerced to a certain extent, because it 
is a very solid and tangible thing and easily reached 
by legal processes. A Union, or the collective body of 
the employes of a corporation, is a very different 
thing and very much less tangible. Moreover, you 



The church and labor. l3l 

cannot compel a man to work beyond the term of his 
legal notice if the award is unsatisfactory to the 
laborers, and you cannot compel a capitalist to con- 
tinue in business if the award is unsatisfactory to him. 
These difficulties do not apply to conciliation. The 
agreements effected by it do not appeal to the passions, 
because they do not imply either victory or defeat. 
They cannot be questioned by the parties, because 
they are their own work. They are likely to be per- 
manent, because they are intelligent and voluntary. 
This is the wise and the Christian way of settling 
labor disputes. Its Christianity is not open to ques- 
tion. Its wisdom has been approved by wide and 
long experience, and is accepted by the wisest leaders 
of labor as well as by the representatives of the em- 
ployers of labor. The Church can do much to secure 
its general adoption by educating the classes into 
better appreciation of each other, by urging them to 
forestall, as well as settle, disputes by the habit of 
friendly intercourse, by urging the principle of con- 
ciliation upon the attention of all classes, and by the 
offer of its friendly offices as the medium of concilia- 
tion in case of dispute.^ It would have been very un- 
wise for the English Government to interfere and 
force a settlement of the miners' strike, even by com- 
pulsory arbitration. It was wise and proper for an 
English Cabinet Minister to offer his friendly services 
as the medium of conciliation. It would be very un- 
wise for the Church to enter the arena of labor troubles 

1 Since the above was written a great strike in the woollen mills 
at Olneyville, R.I., has been settled by the Catholic clergy of the 
place, who offered their services as a medium of conciliation. 



132 THE CHTOCH AND LABOR. 

as the champion of either side, but it is entirely proper 
and eminently wise and desirable that it should tender 
its good offices as the medium of conciliation in the 
case of any kind of dispute. The Church of Christ 
ought not to forget the special blessing its Founder 
pronounced upon the peace-makers. 

Finally, the Church should preach and teach per- 
sonal righteousness. It should preach it as the con- 
dition of salvation and as the corner-stone of society 
as well. It should preach it as the one sole and suffi- 
cient answer to the problems of personal life and the 
problems of social life also. It is quite true that a 
man needs to have sound and true thoughts. It is 
true that his ideas need expanding, his views need 
rectifying, his thoughts need purifying. But it is 
true also that after we have passed the few great fun- 
damentals we need to turn to other things. If a man 
love his God with all his heart and soul, it does not 
greatly signify whether he conceive of that God as a 
simple unit or as a tri-unit. If a man love his neigh- 
bor as himself, or, better, as Jesus loved his neighbors, 
it does not greatly signify whether he regard that neigh- 
bor as the fallen son of Adam or as in the process of 
development from ignorant and barbaric innocence into 
tried and proven virtue. There are certain truths which 
man must know and the Church must constantly 
repeat, but beyond these her teaching should be of 
life, and even these should never be held and taught 
as abstractions but always with a view to their results 
on life, and their interpretation in life. The Church 
must insist that men shall hate the evil and cling to 
the good, and that the utmost compliance with form 



THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 133 

and ceremony and the utmost benevolence with ill- 
gotten gains will never atone for injustice or lies, lust 
or greed. No man who shows any of these in any of 
the relations of life is a true member of the Church 
of Christ. The Church exists to drive these abuses 
out of the world and out of the minds and hearts of 
men, and it can neither tolerate nor condone their 
existence in the lives of its own children. The im- 
portance of this preaching of righteousness in the 
daily life and constant insistence upon its practice 
cannot be overestimated. That way lies the building 
up of conditions of life and society which shall abolish 
the abuses that have their roots in personal unright- 
eousness. 

When the employer has become a lover of justice 
and equity, considerate and helpful in his thought of 
others, scorning to take advantage of any man's igno- 
rance or necessity, he will see to it that as far as lies in 
his power his relations with those he employs shall be 
right. He will realize the nobility and high responsi- 
bility of the mission to which he has been called. He 
will neither overreach nor oppress, not because of the 
restraint of the law or through fear of the Union, but 
because of the righteousness of his own nature. When 
the employed has learned to control his passions, to 
seek only his rights, to recognize to the full the rights 
of others, to square his conduct by the rules of Chris- 
tianity rather than by the dictates of passion, he will 
be ready to make his side of the relation fair and just, 
not under compulsion of human law, but under the 
gentle constraint of the divine law of love. Both 
sides have much to learn, both have much advance to 



134 THE CHURCH AKD LABOR. 

make in manhood, and as they so learu and so advance 
the question which divides them melts into air. By- 
teaching and leading, encouraging and inspiring, the 
Church must make its principal contribution to the 
settlement. 

It is very probable that the positions here taken 
would, if generally proclaimed, meet with wide dissent. 
The statement that a question so vexed and so invet- 
erate, so filled and surrounded by passion and prejudice, 
could be settled in any other way than by force or 
authority, least of all by the simple process of the 
Christianizing of individuals, would strike many as 
the gospel struck the ancient world ; to some it would 
be a stumbling-block and to others foolishness. And 
yet there are abundant signs, if men would only stop 
to look at them, that the positions taken are sound. 
The relations of men have always depended more on 
the men themselves than on the political and social 
systems under which they have lived. Domestic 
slavery is unquestionably the most abominable form 
of industrial relations ever devised, and yet in cases 
where the property of good men the condition of 
the Southern negro was better than it has ever 
been in freedom, and better than that of the aver- 
age of free laborers the world over. In cases where 
the employer and the employed have been alike honor- 
able and Christian in character, their relations have 
been pleasant, and labor and compensation have been 
equally satisfactory to both in the entire absence of 
any controlling legislation. But when suspicion and 
grasping selfishness have filled the minds of either 
party, no laws have ever yet been sufficient to har- 



THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 135 

monize their relations,, nor is it probable that any ever 
will be. The great proposition of the sufficiency of 
Christian manhood is not yet properly recognized. 
We recognize it as sufficient for heaven, we do not 
recognize it as sufficient for earth. We have not yet 
adequately unified our thought upon these matters. 
Some of the unities we recognize, others we may have 
yet to learn. We have held, by implication at least, 
that some things must be settled in some ways and 
other things in other ways. Some things are final in 
some departments of life, others in other departments 
of life. When wq have thought a little deeper, we 
shall see the underlying unities. Let the Church hold 
more firmly than it has yet held, teach more persis- 
tently than it has yet taught, the great truth that the 
one hope of humanity and the one promise of progress 
and the one possibility of solution of human problems 
lie in the betterment of humanity itself, and the time 
will come when the world at large will see it and act 
on it also. Education is good ; law is good ; pros- 
perity is good ; relief is good ; all effort aimed at the 
lightening of human suffering, the restraint of human 
passion, or the betterment of the conditions of human 
life is good ; but fundamental to them all is the great 
work of making pure and holy, as Christians say 
Christlike, the human unit. That is the work of the 
Church, and he who does it sincerely and devoutly is 
doing God's work and helping in the most effectual 
way his needy brother. When the Church has done 
its perfect work, there will be no labor question, and 
however much confidence men may place in other 
lines of effort, if they belittle the Church and its work 



136 THE CHURCH AND LABOR. 

and refuse to trust the power of its ministrations, they 
are doing their best to obstruct the successful out- 
come of their own plans. When Jesus refused to 
divide the inheritance, he added a few words about the 
harmful power of covetousness which pointed the way 
to a final settlement of that, and all similar disputes 
more permanent, more just and more helpful than any 
he could have made by intervention. When the 
Church refuses to interfere to divide the inheritance 
between the warring classes of men, it, too, can render 
the help needful for the full, permanent and equitable 
settlement of the whole matter by pointing out the 
real cause of difference and the only way by which 
that cause can be removed. 



VI. 

THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 



One of the most fundamental ideas of the American 
political system is the entire and absolute separation 
of Church and State. Taught by the errors of the 
past, and in some cases by their own experiences, our 
ancestors incorporated the principle of entire religious 
liberty into their constitutional compact and their 
descendants cherish it to this day as one of the most 
precious items in that agreement. That every man 
shall be absolutely free to worship God as he pleases, 
or even not at all if he so please, subject, so long as he 
neither violates law nor outrages decency, to no inter- 
ference save from the moral suasion of friends and 
neighbors and the general sympathy of the State with 
all religions, is regarded as an inalienable right of the 
individual. That the State should control the Church 
or the Church control the State are equally abhorrent 
to American minds. The State goes to the limit of its 
recognized powers when it protects men in the exercise 
of their religion and does its best, within its constitu- 
tionally imposed limitations, to guarantee them free 
opportunity for such exercise of religion. That Church 

137 



138 THE CHUECH A2sD POLITICS. 

and State should be friendly, is generally admitted as 
desirable. Tliat either should control the other in the 
slightest degree, is something that every true Ameri- 
can is yery much in earnest to prevent. Indeed, we go 
so far in this direction that we seem sometimes almost 
disposed to deny clergymen the ordinary political 
rights of American citizens. We hold that it is the 
duty as well as the right of an American citizen to 
interest himself and even exert himself in the polit- 
ical affairs of the country or of his neighborhood. If 
he has the ability to do so, he may address his fellow- 
citizens through the press or from the platform. If 
he has decided opinions on matters of public policy, we 
consider it his duty to express them, that his neighbors 
may have the advantage of whatever they may contain 
that is good and helpful. He may advocate the elec- 
tion of his favorite candidate, or he may be a candidate 
himself. But let a clergyman do these things, and he 
will be very soon and sharply reminded that the 
American public do not take kindly to political par- 
sons. His course will be condemned as unbecoming ; 
his parishioners will be annoyed ; the public will look 
askance upon him ; his power for usefulness will be 
greatly impaired. Xo doubt the instinct at the bottom 
of all this is sound enough, but it not infrequently be- 
comes extravagant aud even ridiculous in its expres- 
sion. We are so much afraid of the bogie of religious 
domination in State affairs, that we are disposed to 
condemn the clergyman to the silence of the grave on 
political matters on pain of our severest displeasure. 

Perhaps, however, it would not be entirely unjust to 
say that a good deal of the reluctance to have clergy- 



THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 139 

men interest themselves in political affairs comes from 
a feeling on the part of the public that political affairs 
are not always conducted in ways fit for clerical par- 
ticipation, and a hesitancy on the part of some politi- 
cians to have their methods and practices submitted 
to the scrutiny of the clerical eye. They cannot help 
feeling that the clerical mind would not entirely 
approve their ways, and so they say that clergymen 
do not understand such things and would better keep 
away from them. It is not intended to say, or even to 
suggest, that politicians are consciously wicked, even 
when their methods seem most peculiar to the non- 
political eye. But, as an incident perhaps of the deep- 
lying conviction of the desirability of the entire 
separation of Church and State, there has grown up 
a separation of politics from other human interests. 
It has somehow come to be assumed that the world 
of politics is a world by itself, that its ways are not 
like the ways of others, that its ethics and morals are 
not to be judged by the ethics and morals of the 
Church, or even of the world at large, because the 
world of political life is a law unto itself and has its 
own code of ethics and morals separate from all others. 
We accept or condone in a man's political conduct 
many methods and practices which we should condemn 
unsparingly in his business or social life. A trade, 
a trick, a deception which we should consider dishonest 
and unmanly in private life often becomes brilliant 
tactics and claim for promotion on the field of political 
warfare. The proper and legitimate separateness of 
a man's private character and his political character 
is constantly being implicitly recognized in the state- 



14:0 THE CHUBCH A^TD POLITICS. 

ments and estimates concerning public men which 
appear in the public prints. Indeed, it is not un- 
common to find men whose political morality is of the 
very lowest posing as moral and even religious leaders 
in their communities. The name of McKane, the de- 
posed boss of Gravesend, may be safely mentioned 
because he is now lying under sentence, and he, you 
will remember, has been for many years the superin- 
tendent of a large Sunday-school. He is one of many 
and, though perhaps there are few cases as extreme 
as his, the type is altogether too common. We are 
being taught to consider that certain private sins and 
vices do not disqualify for high public office, and we 
are being taught that we must judge the morals of 
politics by the standard of politics. In the great 
majority of cases this habit of judging political moral- 
ity by its own peculiar standards is probably entirely 
innocent of any wrong intent. That standard has been 
accepted as right, just as the thievish Afghan or the 
licentious Turk accepts his standard as right, and there 
is no compunction of conscience attending the follow- 
ing of it. Only when somebody comes along who has 
not accepted that peculiar standard, he makes himself 
very disagreeable and his departure is most devoutly 
desired. It is not recognized that he is better, nor is 
there any disturbance of conscience arising from his 
protests, but his ignorance, and his lack of apprecia- 
tion of distinctions considered very clear and very 
important are most annoying and most embarrassing. 
And so clergymen are constantly advised not to bother 
their heads about politics, because they do not and can- 
not understand them. 



THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 141 

It can hardly be said that the political life of the 
country has thriven, at least on the moral side, in this 
region to which it has so largely banished itself. 
There are a good many people yet left who persist in 
judging politics and politicians by the old and some- 
times unwelcome standards of the Decalogue and the 
Golden Eule. They feel that it is nonsense to say 
that things are commendable if done by a man in one 
capacity which would be disreputable if done by the 
same man in another capacity. They feel that it is 
impossible for a man to be a good man if he is bad in 
some relations, an honest one if dishonest in some 
relations, a pure one if impure in spots. And so, 
judging by the old standards, there is much that is 
highly objectionable in the conduct of politics and 
politicians, much that apparently stands in very sore 
need of some kind of regenerating and uplifting in- 
fluence. Men of high public station have not hesitated 
to defend the corruption of voters, on the ground that 
the issues at stake warranted it. So much of the 
prosperity of the country, says A, is involved in the 
success of my party that so small a matter as the buy- 
ing or scaring of a few hundred ignorant fellows who 
would not know enough to vote right if left to them- 
selves, is not to be considered for an instant. The men 
who defend such practices are few indeed, but perhaps 
they are more to be respected than the many who 
indulge in them without defending them. The extent 
to which the corruption and intimidation of voters is 
carried is something frightful. Figures have been 
compiled within a few years showing a percentage of 
purchasable and generally purchased votes in some 



142 THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 

of our oldest and most respectable communities so 
large that the true American ought not only to feel 
the hot blush of shame but the sharp twinge of fear. 
The discouraging part of it is that it is not easy to set 
the machinery of political parties in motion to put a 
stop to such practices, because no political manager 
knows how soon the exigencies of his own situation 
may mo\^e him to a lively appreciation of the advan- 
tages of making friends of the mammon of unrighteous- 
ness. He is as ready as any one can be to declare that 
it is subversive of the highest interests of a free state 
that there should be a purchasable contingent liable to 
be improperly induced to vote wrongly, but that there 
should be an accessible reserve capable of being in- 
duced to vote rightly at critical times may strike him 
as a very different matter indeed. 

Indeed, we touch here the two great evils of politics, 
not merely in America, but in all free countries ; the 
evil of corruption, and the evil of over-consideration of 
expediency. The corrupting influence cast over politics 
by the self-seeking of powerful, rich and unscrupulous 
interests has been painfully apparent for many years. 
More than one railroad has carried a State Legislature 
or two as a part of its property assets. More than one 
great combination of capital has kept such hold on 
the springs of political action as to shape that action 
for the crushing of rivals and the large advancement 
of its own interests. Every legislative body in the 
Union, from town councils to the Senate of the United 
States, has counted among its members persons who 
owed their seats there soleh^ to their subserviency to 
some interest, corporation or trust. Such men, and 



THE CHUKCH AND POLITICS. 143 

the powers that make and support them, are in politics 
for them-selves only. They have absolutely no interest 
in national or even local affairs. They seek only the 
furtherance of their own interests. Most prominent 
among these evil interlopers, and by far the most mis- 
chievous of them all, is the liquor interest. Whatever 
may be individual opinion as to the best way of deal- 
ing with the curse and evil of intemperance, there is 
no serious dispute of the proposition that it is a curse 
and an evil. A large proportion of the liquor-dealers 
themselves recognize and deplore the evils of drunk- 
enness. Whatever may be individual opinion as to 
the comparative merits of abstinence and moderate 
drinking, or as to the kind or amount of restriction 
that should be put on the supplying of liquor to the 
public, there is very large agreement, except on the 
part of the habitues of the lower class of saloons, as 
to the demoralizing influence of the liquor trade on 
politics. The saloon-keeper acquires a tremendous 
influence over many of his customers. He has the 
power to supply them with that which they have 
learned to desire above all things else. He is their 
creditor. In many cases he knows that concerning 
their records which makes them, his slaves. Many a 
saloon-keeper counts his voters as he counts his barrels 
and his bottles. The primaries in the larger cities are 
not infrequently held in saloons, and the meetings of 
the inner circles who dictate and control the actions 
of the primaries are held there generally. From the 
highest to the lowest places in politics the influence 
of the saloon is felt, felt shamefully, felt disastrously, 
felt potently. And this influence is openly and pro- 



144 THE CHURCH AXD POLITICS. 

fessedly used for selfish ends and selfish, ends only. 
The saloon, its work and its influence, are coming to be 
hated more and more by all good men and women. 
Its blighting effect upon industry, the frightful tribute 
it levies annually upon young manhood and young 
womanhood, the endless and constantly swelling stream 
of anguish, pauperism, crime, insanity, disease and 
death that is rolling out of its open doors, are things not 
to be endured. Kecognizing this popular estimate of 
itself, the liquor interest has united itself with the 
closest possible solidity of organization from one end 
of the country to the other. It has learned how to 
throw all its immense influence absolutely as a unit, 
and it defiantly declares that no candidate shall be 
elected and no law passed save with its consent and 
approval, if by any possible exercise of that influence 
it can prevent it. It believes that it holds the key to 
the situation. Unfortunately it begins to look as if 
other people thought so too. The only merit that 
it can claim is that of sincerity. Its representatives 
openly change sides politically and declare that they 
have thrown their weight into the balancing scale for 
the protection of their business. The trade organs 
issue their mandates and declare what candidates must 
be elected and what defeated for the protection of the 
business. They only stand neutral where is a satis- 
factory unanimity of intention to take proper care of 
them on the part of all the contending candidates. 

The possibility of such widespread and successful 
selfish interference lies principally in the very great 
weight commonly given to considerations of expedi- 
ency. Let us try to be entirely just here. The aver- 



THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 145 

age party man is thoroughly and honestly convinced 
of the very great need that there is for the best inter- 
ests of his country that his party should either come 
into power or remain in power. The principles which 
it has laid down in its formal utterances, or which its 
history has embodied in deeds, are very dear to his 
heart, and he feels that they point out the way and the 
only way to national prosperity. Add to this convic- 
tion the still more potent force of attachment to the 
party which has for years enlisted his enthusiasm and 
commanded his earnest efforts, a force which is a mere 
irrational sentiment, but, like all such sentiments, is 
rnore influential in determining the conduct of the 
average human being than the most carefully reasoned 
convictions, and you have a cohesive force that binds 
individuals to parties with bonds not to be broken 
save under the most extraordinary conditions. The 
individual will, therefore, generally follow his leader, 
though it may be sometimes with great inward dis- 
satisfaction, because he is very honestly convinced 
that, in spite of all the things he would desire to have 
otherwise, that is the course that is demanded of him 
by the high interests of his country. He will not bolt 
the nominations, because that would mean the election 
of the candidates of the other party, and that would 
be making a bad matter a great deal worse, a mis- 
fortune for the occurrence of which he could not bring 
himself to be in any way responsible. 

While the private is thus honestly and honorably, 
though possibly a trifle blindly, following the lead of 
his officers, the officers — and let us give them as much 
credit as possible for equal sincerity — are governed 



146 THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 

largely in the mapping out of campaigns by the prob- 
abilities of the gain or loss of votes. Time was when 
some great principle was the thing, and the question 
was how that principle could be stated so clearly and 
pressed upon the minds and hearts of the people so 
strongly that they could be brought to accept it and 
support it. Now the value and importance of the 
party have come to seem the principal things, and the 
question is what careful statement of principle, what 
judicious selection of policy, can be devised which shall 
in the long run secure the party the greatest number 
of votes in the next election. If a class of citizens 
have strong opinions or desires, an attempt will be 
made to promise something in the 'way of meeting 
those opinions or desires, unless it can be made to 
appear that the votes gained in that way will be more 
than offset by those lost from others who have con- 
trary notions and desires or will be more sensitive if 
their wishes are not met. If some powerful interest 
threatens the withdrawal of its influence and support 
in case certain things are done, those things are not 
very likely to be done. There is even a hesitation to 
attack comparatively unfriended abuses with any vigor 
because of the ever-present possibility that they may 
be some day turned to account. Who has not been 
edified by the declarations of all parties, lo, these 
many years, on the subject of Civil Service reform ? 
Who has been very greatly edified by the performance 
of either of them ? How large the promises of the 
party platforms ! How incommensurate the common 
performance of the successful party ! Only a few 
months ago the indignation of the whole country was 



THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 147 

deeply stirred by certain performances at Washington. 
A minority of the Senate, taking advantage of rules 
of order which are the legacy of former times and far 
different conditions, blocked for a considerable time 
the progress of legislation which had manifestly a 
clear majority in its favor and was being most ur- 
gently demanded by a majority of the people of all 
parties. It really looked for a while as if the Ameri- 
can principle of government by the majority, whether 
a correct principle or not, was to be set aside, and the 
power of absolute veto put into the hands of a very small 
minority. Indeed, the breaking of that particular dead- 
lock did not settle the principle, and it still looks very 
much as if that un-American power were actually 
vested in the minority of the Senatorial body. The 
point of the whole matter is that while nobody on 
either side of the House except the obstructionists 
themselves enjoyed the situation, neither party was 
willing to commit itself to the task of removing the 
conditions which made the situation possible and 
capable of repetition at any time, because each party 
felt that the time might come when it might be very 
glad to avail itself of the power of obstruction. It 
was a cowardly and disreputable weapon, but a very 
convenient thing to have in one's boot-leg all the 
same. 

Government by parties is apparently a necessary 
condition of national self-government, but it has cer- 
tain serious and apparently inevitable drawbacks, 
arising largely from the difficulty which most men 
find in being patriots without being thick and thin 
party men. It is very difficult for the average man 



148 THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 

to force himself into action in the interest of better 
politics at the apparent risk of the defeat of the party 
that is dear to him. This is not said as a criticism, 
but simply as a statement of the very evident fact of 
the case. Sometimes we find ourselves influenced by 
the cry, "Principles, not men!" and when nominal 
tions not fit to be made are put before the public, we 
are told that, after all, the personality of the public 
officer does not greatly matter in comparison with the 
great principles for which the party stands, and the 
one important thing is that those principles shall not 
suffer defeat. Again, some conspicuously strong man 
is nominated on an unsatisfactory platform, and the 
party is held together by the appeal to the voter's 
manifest duty to vote for the best man. These 
matters are carried into the pettiest details of local 
administration and into those matters which have no 
proper concern with party politics at all. The party 
must score everywhere for the maintenance of its 
prestige, and not one of its candidates, from the least 
even unto the greatest, should be sacrificed for any- 
thing short of a profitable trade. Municipal politics 
ought to have no connection, or at most a very loose 
one, with party politics. But the cities control much 
rich patronage, and the party contests over the posses- 
sion of that patronage are fierce in the extreme. At- 
tempts at municipal reform or at the denationalization 
of municipal politics are met and defeated again and 
again by adroit and unscrupulous appeal to this strong 
and abiding sentiment of party loyalty. We had a 
really laughable instance of it the other day in the 
local election of one of our larger cities. Twenty 



THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 149 

thousand men, in round numbers, voted for a princi- 
ple of municipal policy, and only six hundred could be 
found ready to couple with that perfectly sincere vote 
for a principle a vote for the only candidate who was 
nominated on the basis of that principle, or likely to 
act upon it with any energy if it had been accepted 
by the majority of the people. 

Let us not make the fatal mistake of supposing that 
it has become the duty of good men to avoid politics, 
and leave them in the hands of those who have de- 
graded and discredited them. We have all of us 
heard men of standing and influence in the com- 
munity say that they could have nothing to do with 
politics consistently with self-respect. They not only 
abstain from participation themselves, but they do all 
that they can to discourage young men from participa- 
tion. They speak of politicians as if a politician were 
necessarily a scamp, unfit for the society of decent 
people. They speak of these activities and interests 
which are so important as if they were things that 
could not be taken to heart without disgrace. They 
do their best to secure to the unfittest a monopoly of 
government, and then complain bitterly because things 
go badly. There is no doubt that there is much in 
politics that is bad and that sadly needs mending. 
But that does not alter the fact that a man's political 
duties and relations, especially in a free government, are 
among the most important that come to him. Duty is 
not to be done by dodging responsibility or by hiding 
behind bushes and asking if we are each other's 
keepers. The real problem here, and it is a real and a 
very important problem, is how can we proceed so as 



150 THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 

to enlist the active interest of the best men in politics, 
so as to secure their services for the uplift and puri- 
fication of that which is really a high and noble 
occupation, and so bring back political ethics to the 
level of ordinary ethics, revive a single standard of 
moral values, and place every man's political actions 
under the direct control of his highest convictions. 

Let us try to see what contribution the Church can 
make that will give promise of helpfulness in the set- 
tlement of the problem. First let us dispose of two 
things which the Church is sometimes tempted to do, 
but never should do. Fortunately we can dispose of 
them very quickly, as the objection is not theoretical 
but practical, not argument but history. They have 
been tried sufficiently to warrant a conclusion from 
the record, and the record is one of failure. Govern- 
ment by ecclesiastics has been tried and has failed. 
The ecclesiastic is not a good statesman as a rule, 
especially if he be a member of a Church whose organ- 
ization is very close. His very profession is narrowing 
from the confinement of its mental outlook to certain 
specific things. Even in these days, when the current 
views of the clergyman's place and duties have under- 
gone such extreme modification, the greatest care is 
necessary in order that the clerical mind shall not 
become narrow and biassed. If that does happen, the 
fact that it is a strong and able mind only makes mat- 
ters worse. It is not to be denied that there have 
been many great European statesmen in past times 
who have been in clerical orders, but it is to be re- 
membered that that was in an age when the Church 
offered the only career that was open to talent simply, 



THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 151 

and so attracted the very best and nearly all of the 
strongest men of the time. It is also to be remembered 
that their administrations, able and helpful as they 
were, must be judged by the needs and standards of 
their time. The administration of Richelieu would 
hardly pass muster in the days of Carnot and Gladstone. 
Government by clerical parties is no better. They are 
the most arbitrary and the most prejudiced of all par- 
ties, and they are physically and mentally incapaci- 
tated, by reason of the very depth of their laudable 
attachment to those things which they have learned 
to consider the paramount interests of humanity, from 
taking large and sound and true views of public policy. 
It is extremely desirable that religious conviction shall 
dominate in public affairs. It is extremely undesira- 
ble that denominational and sectarian convictions shall 
dominate in public affairs. There may be an uprising 
of the religious people of a community that shall go 
to the polls and destroy a party or abolish an abuse, 
but that is not the act of a clerical party. A clerical 
party can have no basis save in denominationalism. 

It is always best in all discussions to be sure of your 
definitions and other premises. If parties have alto- 
gether different views as to the nature and objects of 
the things they are discussing, they are not very likely 
to come to intelligent or helpful decisions. What the 
Church can do for politics depends very largely on 
what we conceive as the purposes, respectively, of 
Church and State. We may assume that those who 
have followed these lectures need no further word in 
detail as to the proper aims and divine purposes of the 
Christian Church. We may perhaps pause profitably 



152 THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 

a little over the other question. A good many people 
accept the great facts of the social universe^ the 
Church, the State, the school, the mill, the store, the 
family, as simply matters of course. They exist; we 
are necessarily related to them; in many cases it is our 
duty to take part in their management. It is begin- 
ning to become clear that we cannot do this wisely 
and well unless we have looked into the basis of these 
things. We must know not simply that they are, but 
why they are. So thoughtful men are casting about 
to-day to find satisfactory answers to these questions. 
The old idea of the divine right of kings, and of the 
State as being simply the means for the aggrandize- 
ment of the particular royal family that God has gra- 
ciously been pleased to set over it, still subsists in a 
few quarters, but is fast being driven from the minds 
that still retain it. Then there is that theory of the 
State that regards all government as a necessary and 
temporary evil, and considers that government the 
best that governs the least. That commerce and in- 
dustry may be carried on successfully, that there may 
be some measurable security against internal disorders 
and foreign aggressions, political organizations are rec- 
ognized as necessary. They should, however, accord- 
ing to this view, be only sufficiently strong and en- 
trusted with only sufficient powers for the execution 
of these their proper functions. Another view of the 
purpose and functions of the State goes to the other 
extreme. Instead of entrusting to the State as little 
as possible, it entrusts to it as much as possible. It 
looks to it for the supply of all the needs of humanity, 
the righting of all wrongs, the abolition of all injus- 



THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 153 

tices, the levelling of all inequalities. Men individu- 
ally may go on much as they are, but the agency of the 
State, the collective body of men, is to do away not 
only with all artificial inequalities but even with those 
that arise from the natural inequalities in human char- 
acter and equipment. The powers of the State are 
regarded as almost miraculous in their extent, and re- 
sults are expected from its action which are absolutely 
ludicrous in their disregard of the natural and insur- 
mountable limits upon political power. 

After all has been said, can we define the purpose of 
the State better than to say that it is the incarnation 
of ideas in institutions ? History seems to point 
clearly to some basis for nationality other than mere 
expediency. Nations cannot be made arbitrarily. 
They grow. Each one seems to have some particular 
mission, some contribution to make to the world's prog- 
ress, some idea to incarnate in its institutions. The 
value of the contribution, the attractive power of the 
idea, determine largely the historic place of the na- 
tion. These national ideas are not mere theories, the 
notions of a few leaders as to what men should do and 
what think. Attempts to build national life on such 
bases fail without exception. The national ideas are 
a part of the national life, a factor in the life and char- 
acter of the people. The national life is dominated 
by them, its institutions manifest them, they are the 
reason for the national existence. We are quite fa- 
miliar with the thought of the special contributions 
that have been made to the life of the world by the 
great nations of the past. Every schoolboy has been 
taught that from the Phoenician we get the spirit of 



154 THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 

commercial enterprise, from the Greek the develop- 
ment of the sesthetic nature, from the Roman the 
power of legal and social organization, and from the 
Hebrew the idea of the oneness of the divine energy. 
These nations existed that they might incarnate these 
ideas in their institutions and give them to the world. 
By so doing they made direct contribution to the ad- 
vance of humanity, to the attainment of its higher, 
diviner life. St. Paul struck the very root of the 
whole matter when he said in his speech on Mars^ 
Hill, " God hath made of one blood all nations of men 
for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath 
determined the times before appointed, and the 
bounds of their habitation; that they might seek 
after the Lord, if haply they might feel after him 
and find him." The nations, that is, are divinely 
appointed means whereby men are to be lifted to more 
elevated planes of life. The purpose of the nation is 
ethical and religious, in the highest, though not per- 
haps in the conventional sense, and not merely war- 
like, commercial or convenient. The administration 
of the political concerns of the people should be guided 
by the desire to make this purpose eJ0B.cient and to free 
the institutions which shall manifest the national idea 
as far as possible from the admixture of other and 
baser elements. Certainly we Americans are not 
likely to be allowed to forget that our country has 
a mission to humanity. It is to be feared, however, 
that the phrase is more often the glittering generality 
of a popular harangue than the expression of a deep 
and intelligent conviction. The phrase is right. We 
need a keener and truer appreciation of its real mean- 
ing and importance. 



THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 155 

In the light of such, an interpretation of the pur- 
pose and meaning of the State, the political activities 
and duties of the citizen take on higher and deeper 
meanings. They become a part of his religious duties. 
They are among his holiest as well as his most impor- 
tant relations. Just in proportion as their true values 
are pressed upon him will he feel constrained to be 
faithful and devoted in attention to them, earnest and 
disinterested in thought about them. If the State 
has no higher purpose than the aggrandizement of a 
family or a class, why should the citizen concern him- 
self with its affairs, save to defend himself from undue 
oppression or to secure his own incidental aggran- 
dizement ? Indeed, under any materialistic or utilita- 
rian view of the State, it seems only consistent that 
politics should be materialistic and utilitarian ; that 
they should be sought and followed for selfish pur- 
poses ; that they should emancipate themselves from 
the control of ordinary moral standards ; in short, 
that just those things should take place that are tak- 
ing place in the more discouraging phases of the 
political life of the day. The average man is hardly 
likely to spend a great deal of time in analyzing, or 
even in formulating, his ideas, but he has the ideas 
nevertheless, and they dominate his actions. Ideas 
are the only things in the universe that have real 
force, and the reform of conduct must always begin 
with the elevation of ideas. Let the citizen feel the 
large importance of the State's divine mission, and a 
long step has been taken toward the improvement of 
his political conduct. He will be less disposed to 
shirk his political duties. They will come home to 



156 THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 

him as divine calls not to be ignored. He will be as 
ashamed to prostitute politics to base ends as he is to 
do the like by things whose nobility he commonly 
recognizes. He will see the ntter absurdity of setting 
up a separate code of political morals, and he will see 
that only the purest and highest ethical and moral 
ideas have proper place in connection with matters so 
important. 

Just here is the point of contact through which the 
Church can properly influence politics. The Church 
can do a great deal in the way of elevating and puri- 
fying the popular conception of the State, its nature, 
purpose and intent. It ought not to be frightened by 
-senseless clamor, or repelled by prejudice or timidity, 
but should realize the fact that an important part 
of its mission with human life lies in the direction of 
the betterment of the political and social relations of 
men. It can and should insist, too, that every man 
strive as far as possible to make his political acts the 
register of his very highest thought and principle. 
Political leaders never lay down programmes which 
they do not expect to be able to induce their followers 
to carry out. Were there such insistence upon principle 
and righteousness on the part of the membership of all 
parties that an iniquitous proposition became danger- 
ous in exact proportion to its iniquity ; that a dishonest 
trade could never be consummated because no voter 
would allow himself to be a party to it, whatever the 
cost of the refusal; that a smirched candidate became 
weak iu exact proportion to the stains on his name, — 
a long step would have been taken in the direction 
of the purification of politics. The Church and the 



THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 157 

pulpit cannot array themselves on the side of a par- 
ticular party. They should never descend to partisan- 
ship. They should stay always on the high plane of 
principles, leaving the policies that shall embody 
the principles and the parties that shall formulate the 
policies to others. Sometimes, indeed, it happens 
that a party may become so fully identified with a 
great moral principle that the pulpit, in its advocacy 
of that principle, may appear to become partisan, 
but that does not afford ground for shunning the 
principle. The pulpits that stood for the principle of 
human freedom as against the practice of domestic 
slavery in the second quarter of this century were 
denounced as partisan, and not infrequently forsaken 
by their own supporters as meddlers with things that 
did not concern them, but we see now that their occu- 
pants were only doing their clear duty in standing for 
principle and preaching the gospel of the brotherhood 
of man. The very men who were abused and even 
persecuted for their course in those days lived to see 
themselves loved and honored for it when men, largely 
by their efforts, came to see the truth of the principle 
for which they stood. Nothing could be wider of 
the truth than the frequently expressed sentiment 
that the Church and the pulpit should have nothing 
to do with politics. The Church should have nothing 
to do with parties, as such, it is true, but what is it 
good for as the salt and the light if it cannot help 
men to govern themselves more wisely, more justly, 
and more righteously than they have yet been able to 
do it ? Perhaps it would be hasty to say that the 
political life of the nation is deteriorating, but if 



158 THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 

the Church is to be permanently divorced from 
politics, the oversight of men's political acts taken 
away from their moral and religious convictions, and 
political life to be allowed to construct, ethically and 
morally, its own codes of law, there can be no doubt 
that such deterioration will take place and will pro- 
ceed to startling and disastrous lengths. 

It may be questioned, perhaps, whether the Church 
as a whole is ready to take up the kind of work it 
should do with politics. It is extremely probable 
that before it could be done successfully and effectively 
some special preparation would be needed by both 
clergymen and laymen. - It does not require much 
consideration to see that when the Church becomes 
specific in teaching or admonition, it is very likely to 
hurt somebody's feelings. This is especially the case 
when it is dealing with matters that the people think, 
or want to think, none of its business. When we get 
out of certain narrow, beaten tracks, where whatever 
is done is accepted without protest, and generally 
without a great deal of thought, as simply the proper 
and conventional thing, we encounter so many diflS.- 
culties that there is a constant and powerful tempta- 
tion to the average minister to content himself with 
the conventionalities, prophesy smooth things, and let 
sentimental enthusiasm or elaborate accessories make 
up for the lack of ideas. The things in this world 
which are best worth doing and most need to be done 
are not easy. They are beset with difficulties and are 
accomplished with almost infinite pains. It has 
never yet appeared that the world has been greatly 
helped by anybody who shunned every difficulty and 



THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 159 

feared taking any risk of misunderstanding. In this 
case the difficulties are largely such as can be avoided 
by tact and discretion. Indeed, it is sometimes said 
that this particular line of work lays an unreasonable 
requirement in the way of tact on the shoulders of 
the average minister. The danger of getting beyond 
his depth is so very great, that he would do better to 
keep out of the stream altogether. Perhaps if the 
average minister could be made to understand better 
than he now seems to do that tact and common-sense 
are prime requirements for the ministerial office, and 
that without them, genius, learning, and even piety 
and zeal go lame, we should have more successful 
Church work done than is now common. There some- 
times seems room for a suspicion that those who have 
the training of young men for the ministry are not as 
fully impressed with this fact as would be desirable. 
The Church, not having realized the nature and 
extent of its direct mission to the secular life of men, 
has only too often neglected to train its ministers 
properly for the execution of that mission. They 
should be trained in some knowledge of affairs, in- 
structed in the matters to which they are to apply 
their specific knowledge. It is no doubt highly neces- 
sary that there should be specialists in the more 
abstruse branches of learning, men who shall give 
their lives to pure scholarship, and whose dicta we 
may receive as authoritative in their special lines of 
work. Such men are indeed indispensable. But the 
man who is to go into a Christian pulpit to-day and 
make that pulpit a power in the community, so that 
the life of the place in which he works shall be puri- 



160 THE CHUECH ANB POLITICS. 

fied and elevated by the influence upon it of the gospel 
of Jesus Christ, needs to have his heart full of the 
spirit of that gospel and his head stored with knowl- 
edge of life and affairs, rather than with Greek and 
Hebrew roots and philosophical subtleties. 

Can we be quite positive, on the other hand, that 
the average parish is as just as it should be with 
regard to the liberty of speech and action which it 
stands ready to allow its pastor ? Is it quite certain 
that all the things which are spoken of as " unbecom- 
ing a minister" are really so, and not so designated 
simply by a convenient conventionality? Confining 
our thought for the moment strictly to the matters 
under discussion, it is, as has been before remarked, 
generally considered very bad taste for a minister to 
show much interest in politics and especially to take 
an active part in political operations. There can be 
no question as to the permissibility of using the pul- 
pit for partisan speeches. Enough has been said on 
that point already. But we ought to remember that 
when a man becomes a minister, he does not cease to 
be a citizen nor ought he to be considered as having 
forfeited his political rights. Whatever a man's busi- 
ness or social relations may be, he has the right to act, 
to speak, and even to try to lead and influence others 
so long as that right is exercised in a lawful manner. 
The farmer, the manufacturer, the mill-operative, the 
merchant, the lawyer, the editor, the physician, every 
man, has the right to make platform speeches or to do 
any other legal thing to secure the success of the men 
or the policies he favors. But there are very few 
ministers who could take the platform for political 



THE CHURCH A^H) POLITICS. l6l 

speech-making without very greatly annoying a por- 
tion of their parishioners and perhaps wrecking their 
parishes. Is it not desirable that the time should 
come when people shall understand that in such a 
case the minister is not claiming or trying to repre- 
sent them, but is simply exercising the right of every 
American citizen to express his political views and 
make converts to them if possible ? 

A realization of the conditions of good government 
in a free country reveals at once the indispensable 
necessity to it of the thorough and successful opera- 
tion of those principles which it is the business of the 
Church to impress upon the minds of men. In a free 
country there is only one condition upon which good 
government is a possibility, and that condition is good 
citizenship. In governments of other types that con- 
dition, though desirable, is not so necessary, but in 
free governments it is indispensable. The tendency 
of much of the modern thinking that so exalts the 
State as an abstract unit is in the direction of the 
obscuration of this most important truth. It is not 
sufficient to devise elaborate constitutions and highly 
scientific codes of law. These things are of value just 
so far as they represent and manifest the civic virtues 
and attainments of the people who are to administer 
them and be governed by them, and no farther. When 
the American people threw off their a,llegiance to the 
mother country, after an unsuccessful attempt to get 
along without much of any government, they got to- 
gether and adopted a constitution. For the most part, 
that constitution was a very practical document. It 
was made with a view to the actual conditions and 

M 



162 THE CHURCH AXD POLITICS. 

apparent possibilities of the case. It contained not a 
few make-sliifts and compromises, some of wMch ulti- 
mately made a good deal of trouble. The theory-mon- 
gers of the day had very little voice in its construction, 
and were ver}^ little satisfied with it when constructed. 
But it was made by and for. a people whose capacity 
and attainment in citizenship has rarely, if ever, been 
equalled. The strong, clear brain and the firm hand 
of George Washington found abundant opportunity 
for doing service not less important to the nation's 
welfare than that already rendered on the battle-field, 
in the repression of the turbulent impatience of re- 
straint that had come from successful revolution fol- 
lowed by a period of exceedingly loose government, 
but on the whole the constitution worked well and 
under it the United States has come to be the nation 
that it is to-day. The people were for the most part 
accustomed to an intelligent submission to the re- 
straints of law and the leaders of the people were 
law-loving and law-abiding patriots, content to confine 
their private ambitions within the well-defined limits 
of their proper legal manifestation. 

When the Brazilians, or the few of them who, hav- 
ing the power, assumed to act in the name of the 
masses, deposed and exiled their Emperor, they pro- 
ceeded to construct a government on the latest and 
most approved scientific principles. They formulated 
a constitution which in many respects is both remark- 
able and admirable. It was accepted with much less 
opposition than that shown to our own. From the 
point of view of those who believe that governments 
can accomplish any desired results if only sufficiently 



:rHE CHUBCH a:nd politics. 163 

scientific in construction, it certainly promised great 
things for the happy Brazilians. And yet, under that 
constitution, or so much of it as yet survives, Brazil 
has hardly enjoyed a month of peace and quietness. 
The great mass of the people, Indians, negroes, poor 
whites and half-castes, are not capable of citizenship 
at all, certainly not of its higher and more responsible 
functions. The leaders have shown themselves but 
little better. Poor Brazil is suffering as she is to-day, 
not from any lack of a good form of government, but 
from utter destitution of good citizenship. With 
good citizenship, very indifferent institutions may be 
endured or amended or both. Without it, all else 
fails. 

Good citizenship depends on two factors, — the intel- 
ligence of the individual and the righteousness of the 
individual. That the intelligence of the citizen is 
absolutely necessary to the permanence and success 
of free institutions need not be argued here at length. 
Our ancestors recognized the fact that the government 
which they founded derived its possibility of success 
from the high average intelligence of its citizens. This 
idea that citizenship must be intelligent is wrought into 
the very fibre of our national life. It is the basis of 
our school system. It is the reason for our vast edu- 
cational expenditure. It is the justification for com- 
pulsory education. But valuable as intelligence must 
be conceded to be, it is worse than useless without 
personal righteousness behind it. The things are not 
to be compared with each other because, as conditions 
of citizenship, they are complementary, each useless 
without the other. The purest and most innocent life 



l64 THE CHUECH AKD POLITICS. 

and thought will be useless as equipment for the dis- 
charge of the duties of citizenship unless directed by 
some degree of intelligence. On the other hand, an 
immoral man increases in danger to the community 
exactly as he increases in intelligence. Arm a scoun- 
drel with fine education and large cultivation of his 
intellect merely, and you increase his capacity for mis- 
chief beyond computation. Morality and intelligence, 
these two things must be inseparable, inseparable in 
the eye of the statesman, inseparable as the objects of 
all law and all effort. 

And so we come back once more, as w^e have so 
often done before, to the need that the world has for 
individual righteousness. We come to it not as an 
end which we have sought through devious mazes of 
thought, but as a conclusion met at the end of a 
straight road, a conclusion forced on us by the logic 
of the situation. Pure manhood, pure politics ; im- 
pure manhood, impure politics. Let the people choose. 
That is a plain statement of a very simple alternative, 
and there is absolutely no third course open. The 
Church can be of vast direct help in politics, as before 
stated, by the elevating of the popular conceptions of 
the purpose and mission of national life and by its 
interpretation of the social and political duties of 
men in their higher and truer lights. Indirectly it is 
by far the best, if not the only, agency for the prepa- 
ration of that soil on which alone a pure political 
system can thrive. 

But, some one may ask, is it not harsh and indis- 
criminating to say that politics are neither better 
nor worse than the average personal righteousness of 



THE CHURCH AND POLITICS. 165 

the majority ? Hardly, thougli there are perhaps some 
other factors that ought to be taken into the compu- 
tation, if we were to strive for an absolutely correct 
result. Is it not a rather severe stricture on the 
morals of the people of our American cities, some of 
which are a hissing, and a reproach because of the 
vileness of their local politics, and the brazen effron- 
tery of their misgovernment ? It must be remem- 
bered that a man's morals are sometimes attacked by 
a sort of flabby degeneration that robs them of about 
all their usefulness. Men who are content to let 
things go on from bad to worse so long as their own 
hands are not smirched, cannot be said to add much 
to the moral power of a community. For a good 
many years the morals of the good people of the city 
of Brooklyn suffered from this sort of fatty degen- 
eration, and the city fell under the rule of a ring, said 
to have been a shade worse than Tammany. But one 
day the public righteousness got itself aroused to active 
effort, and things were reversed. As soon as the mo- 
rality of Brooklyn became active, became moral, that is, 
the politics of Brooklyn were purified. When we figure 
the moral assets of a community, a good man who 
keeps his morals strictly for home consumption counts 
for rather more than a scoundrel, but not for appre- 
ciably more than a corpse. If the private life of a 
city is corrupt, violent, dishonest, drunken, mean, its 
public life will have the same characteristics. It is ab- 
solutely useless to spend any time discussing schemes 
for political, or any other kind of reform which do not 
proceed upon the elevating of human character. Few 
men realize the immense debt which every community 



166 THE CHXJBCH AKD POLITICS. 

owes to its churches and to the religious sentiments 
of its people. If the churches of this civilized land 
of ours were all to be closed, and no adequate substi- 
tute provided; if the influences which, flowing from 
them into human lives, are constantly elevating and 
improving those lives, even without the comprehension 
of the individual, were to be shut off, leaving nothing 
in their place, no power on earth could prevent the 
speedy relapse of this favored land into a savagery 
as much worse than that of Central Africa as it would 
be more educated. Let the Church hold constantly be- 
fore the minds of the people the great truth that right- 
eousness exalteth a nation, and sin is a disgrace to any 
people, a disgrace, be it added by way of explanation, 
to its intelligence as well as to its morals. 



VII. 

THE CHURCH AND REFORMS. 



When Bishop Brooks of Massachusetts died the re- 
mark was made by a well-known Boston minister that 
he was not as closely identified with certain reforms 
as many could have wished. The criticism, though 
rather more kindly made than such criticisms com- 
monly are, points to a real trouble that a good many 
people find with the course and conduct of the Church 
and a real difficulty that most ministers have to en- 
counter in the actual work of their ministry. The 
Church, like the rest of humanity, is divided broadly 
into classes, — the party of progress and the party of 
rest, the party that is anxious for change or, as it would 
itself say, for reform, and the party that distrusts the 
proposed changes, is inclined to doubt whether they 
are really reforms, and prefers to leave matters much 
as they are. Both parties have very decided opinions, 
and both are liable to be impatient of opposition or 
contradiction. The reformers are impatient of the 
slowness and timidity of Church and minister. They 
are so fully convinced of the importance and the in- 

167 



168 THE CHXIECH AKD REFORMS. 

trinsic righteousness of their work, that they are not 
able to comprehend hesitation on the part of a con- 
scientious minister to throw himself into it heart and 
soul. There are comparatively few thoroughly earnest 
reformers who are active Churchmen. Xot infre- 
quently they are outspoken in their opposition to the 
Church. They feel its supposed shortcomings the 
more keenly because it seems to them that they have 
a right to expect so much from it. A conservative 
course, or a position of coolness and reserve on its 
part; seems to them treason to its own high calling. 
They expect to see the minister their champion. They 
think that as a laborer for the good of humanity he 
ought to be as interested as they are; ought to be ready 
with voice and deed ; ought to make his pulpit a valu- 
able adjunct to their work. 

On the other hand, the reformer is commonly re- 
garded by his average fellow-citizen who has not given 
a great deal of thought to the things which stir the 
reformer's soul to just indignation, and move him to 
most persistent effort, as something of a crank and 
a good deal of a nuisance. The spectacle of great 
excitement over things in which he is not interested 
is not a little wearisome to the average man. "We like 
to adjust ourselves to current conditions as one fits 
himself into the indentations in the comfortable cush- 
ions of the familiar easy-chair, and having thus made 
ourselves comfortable we do not like to be disturbed. 
We do not want to make new efforts. We do not want 
to be stirred till our awakened consciences will let us 
rest no longer. We devoutly desire that these awk- 
ward people who are so intensely and disagreeably in 



THE CHURCH AND REFORMS. 169 

earnest about this, that and the other thing would go 
away and let us rest. We don't go to church to be 
thus disturbed, we don't want the minister constantly 
dragging such things into his sermons; we do want 
him to keep to things which are usually regarded as 
the common interests of men, and which will not be 
likely to cause any divisions. We forget sometimes 
that our Lord's preaching brought not peace but a 
sword, and drew lines of division even between the 
members of the family circle, and we want his distant 
followers to avoid all matters which shall divide the 
household of faith. So from this side a constant press- 
ure is brought on Church and minister to keep them 
conservative and detach them, as much as possible, 
from the actual active prosecution of reform work. 

Not infrequently this influence is strong enough to 
keep the Church from doing the work in the interest 
of reforms which it really ought to do. The Church 
is naturally conservative, naturally much attached to 
the traditions and methods of the past, naturally averse 
to rash incursions into untried regions. Its scholar- 
ship, and the almost necessary limitations upon its 
scope of view, predispose it to a position of somewhat 
retrospective contemplation rather than to one of push- 
ing and active interest in current affairs. Under the 
influence of these things, it is unquestionable that in 
many cases in the past the Church has not only not 
done much for the furtherance of reform but has 
actually stood, as an organization, across the path of 
reform. We shall have to admit that many of the 
important reforms that have made the nineteenth cen- 
tury what it is have not only been brought about with- 



170 THE CHURCH AND EEFORMS. 

out the active help of the Church, but even against the 
opposition of the Church. For generations the churches 
of America defended the practice of human slavery to 
such an extent that the Abolitionists considered the 
Church one of their doughtiest opponents, and many of 
the most active of them felt constrained to renounce 
it. It was only late in the day, after abolitionism had 
become popular, that it wheeled into line and took, as 
a body, the position which the friends of human liberty 
felt that it ought to have occupied from the beginning. 
The friends of the cause of woman's advancement have 
never been satisfied with the position of the Church 
as an organization with regard to their reform. Ever 
since the faithful band of ministering women did so 
much, under God, to make the success of our Lord's 
ministry possible, the burdens of the Church have rested 
largely on woman's patient shoulders, but while men 
have always been willing to utilize her labors they 
have not been willing to hear her voice in council. 
There are very few denominations to-day which recog- 
nize in their polity the equality of women. The 
churches can hardly be expected to do much in the 
way of impressing on the world principles which they 
do not incorporate into their own practice. Other in- 
stances might be cited in plenty, but perhaps enough 
has been said to show that, while the requirement 
may have been often extravagant, yet the Church, as 
an organization, has very often occupied positions dis- 
appointing to even the most reasonable expectation. 

In these closing years of the century the air is fairly 
buzzing with reforms. There is so much complaint of 
existing institutions, and so much and so strenuous 



THE CHUKCH AND REFORMS. 171 

effort to mend them or end them, that we are some- 
times, from this cause alone, tempted to wonder if 
things are not really going backward and the social 
and moral world on the verge of some great disaster. 
Really all this commotion is one of the healthiest 
signs of the times. It shows that men have at last 
awakened to such perception of conditions that they 
are disturbed by them and feel the necessity of mend- 
ing them. In the old days things were really a great 
deal worse, but nobody knew or cared anything about 
it. Sin, wrong, suffering, degradation, ignorance, did 
not lie like nightmares on the minds and hearts of 
men and forbid their leisurely ease-taking in those 
days. They were accepted as matters of course and 
passed by without thought. We distress ourselves 
greatly to-day about the poverty and suffering that 
there is in our great cities and we make enormous, 
though not always wise or systematic, efforts at its 
relief. As matter of fact, there was never a time 
when, barring temporary distress caused by some 
business depression, the condition of the poorer 
classes was anywhere nearly as good as it is to-day. 
Now, however, the thought of it troubles us. Then 
it was accepted as a part of the natural order and the 
Master's much-misunderstood saying that the poor we 
have always with us was supposed to adjust the ob- 
served condition to the divinely ordained natural 
organization of things. We have a familiar illustra- 
tion of the way in which these things affect the pub- 
lic mind in our thought about certain diseases. In 
former days the mortality from small-pox in cold 
climates and from cholera and yellow fever in warm 



172 THE CHURCH AND REFORMS. 

ones was enormous, but attracted comparatively little 
attention. Probably many persons now living can 
easily remember when small-pox was almost continu- 
ously in existence in our seaport towns. Now, 
thanks to the advancement of medical science, we 
have made those three scourges of the race almost 
unknown in enlightened communities. But our land 
is still ravaged by diseases which are probably nearly, 
if not quite, as preventable, but which we never think 
of putting in the same list with the others. If as 
many people were to die in Boston or New York in 
any one year from small-pox, cholera or yellow fever 
as die there annually from consumption, or even from 
diphtheria, the land would shiver with fright from 
one end to the other. One class of diseases we think 
about and try to exterminate, the other we accept as 
part of the natural order of things without thinking 
about it at all. So of the reforms of the day. We 
are beginning to realize how many evil thoughts and 
evil practices, how many incomplete things and how 
many distorted things, there are that stand in the way 
of humanity's advancement, and we are beginning to 
strive valiantly all along the line for the mending or 
the ending of these wrong things. We are beginning 
to see that before the kingdom of our God can come 
in, there must be made a highway through the wilder- 
ness, and so we are trying to level the hills and fill up 
the valleys, to make the crooked places straight and 
the rough places plain. 

Unless we stop to think a bit, it is doubtful if we 
any of us realize the number and the extent of the 
reforms that are pressing for attention at this present 



THE CHURCH AND REFORMS. 173 

time, or the importance of each and every one of them 
and the vigor with which it is urged by its promoters 
as the one thing needful for the setting right of all 
the wrongs that afflict humanity. There is, for in- 
stance, the great question of temperance reform. 
The evils of intemperance, the demoralizing political 
and social influences of the saloon, the enormous tax 
on industry levied to provide for the worse than un- 
productive expenditure for intoxicants, the endless 
train of human woes arising from drink, need only to 
be referred to here. The temperance reformer de- 
clares that this question is the question of questions, 
that the further successful progress of all reforms 
waits on its solution, that there can be no permanent 
betterment of humanity so long as it bears this cancer 
in its vitals. Whatever credence we are inclined to 
give his estimate of its relative importance to other 
things, we can all of us see its great absolute impor- 
tance. Is it unfair to insist that the Church, with all 
its high aims and all its consecrated effort for the up- 
lift of humanity, should lend a strong helping hand 
here ? But then comes a large body of thoroughly 
earnest people who point out that the voices of a 
large part of the community, and that the part that is 
loftiest in its moral ideas and quickest to respond to 
moral appeals, are silenced by their exclusion from 
political equality. They say that it is not only an 
injustice in itself that women should be denied the 
effectual expression of their political desires, but it is a 
very harmful condition as well, because the disfran- 
chisement of women paralyzes the right arm of re- 
form. There is little hope for any of the reforms till 



174 THE CHUECH AND REFORMS. 

the consecrated zeal and tlie self-sacrificing devotion 
to duty of women can be given tlieir proper freedom 
of expression and of operation. Is the Churcli true 
to itself when it does not rise in protest against a 
great injustice ? Is it even worldly-wise in not insist- 
ing upon the disenthralment and the arming of so 
faithful and so potent an ally ? 

Then comes another party, who declare that there is 
no use in spending much time on any of these other 
things so long as the constitution of society is as it is, 
unjust and oppressive. They point to social inequali- 
ties and social abuses, the gulf that separates poverty 
from riches, the enormous differences in conditions 
and in possessions, the distinctions of class, with their 
limitations upon opportunity as well as upon posses- 
sions. They point out that the lust for power and the 
greed for gain are working much iniquity in the earth. 
Militarism, aristocracy, plutocracy and what not are 
abuses that seem to them to need amendment before 
anything further is done or attempted. Certainly 
such abuses call loudly for relief at the hands of the 
followers of the gentle jSTazarene, himself a man of 
the people, who went about doing good and made it 
one of the glories of his life and one of the attestations 
of his mission that he preached the gospel to the poor 
and proclaimed deliverance to the captive and the 
oppressed. All this is true, says another, but the way 
to all these things lies through the education of the 
young. We cannot teach old dogs new tricks, but we 
can train the young in the things they should do. 
The hope of the future lies in the young. It is in the 
[)Ower of the young, if they are properly trained^ to 



THE CHUECH AND HEFOEMS. 175 

bring in and to enjoy a day better than that vouch- 
safed to their fathers. The education of the race has 
been wrong. It has been incomplete. It has not 
fitted the boys and girls to be useful and strong and 
wise men and women. We must remedy all this. 
Educational reform lies at the threshold of all reform, 
and if we can but get that properly attended to it will 
bring in all the others in its train. So speak the ad- 
vocates of educational reform, and they too think that 
the Church stands committed by its duty as humanity's 
helper and commanded by a just appreciation of the 
conditions of its own success to labor here hard and 
long. Perhaps this is enough in detail, but only a 
beginning has been made in pointing out the multi- 
plicity and importance of current reformatory move- 
ments. We have hardly touched the great field of 
political reform, a reform properly held to be of the 
very last importance in a free country, where so much 
depends on obtaining and maintaining the absolute 
purity of political institutions. The alarming preva- 
lence of the social evil calls aloud for remedy, and 
many devout and earnest people are laboring with 
might and main in behalf of higher social standards of 
morals and a purer social life. The claims of neglected 
child-life are pushing to the front, and splendid work 
is being done in securing the sympathy of the people 
and the protection of the law for the miserable and 
unhappy little victims of the evils of certain phases 
of modern life. The conditions of life in the congested 
quarters of our cities are being recognized as prolific 
of countless evils, and much work goes to the reforma- 
tion of the conditions of sanitation and the housing 



176 THE CHUECH AND REFORMS. 

of the poor. It is now being felt that our whole sys- 
tem of dealing with the delinquent members of so- 
ciety is honeycombed with mistakes and abuses. We 
neither deter, reform nor punish. Prison reform of 
widespread and thoroughgoing nature is needed and 
is coming. And so it goes. There is hardly a depart- 
ment of our busy and multiplex modern life and 
thought where the reformer is not busy, hardly one 
where his call for help does not seem based on a real 
need and properly making demand for large attention. 
This brief review of the enormous field of modern 
reforms shows that really effective work in specific 
directions must be done by specialists. Any one of 
these reforms is sufficient to give full occupation to the 
time and talents of any man. If one man attempts to 
spread himself over too many of these matters, he will 
so weaken and dissipate his energies that he cannot 
do effective work anywhere. The conditions here 
have come, with the spread of knowledge and the en- 
largement of interest in these matters, to be not unlike 
those in the field of learning. The days of the men 
of encyclopedic information, men who were really 
eminent in many branches of learning, have become 
part of the irreclaimable past. Such men are no 
longer possible. The sum of knowledge in single 
departments of learning has become so vast that there 
are few men who can be masters of one thing, none 
who can be masters of many. Within the memory of 
men now living it was possible for one man to teach, 
and teach creditably, everything that was contained 
in the curriculum of a college of fair standing. Now 
the very suggestion seemed absurd. In like manner, 



THE CHURCH AND REFORMS. 177 

the day of the all-around champion of the oppressed 
is gone. The modern scientist is sympathetic with all 
learning ; he is learned only in one thing. The modern 
reformer may be sympathetic with all reforms, but he 
can do effective work only within a limited field of 
endeavor. He must pick out his specialty and stick 
to it, devote himself to it mind and heart and soul. 
He must push it, agitate it, work for it, pray for it, 
make it so much a part of his life that the unthinking 
majority will unhesitatingly call him a crank and a 
fanatic, and so, and only so, can he win success. There 
are a great many of these reforms any one of which 
may readily and rightly enlist the attention of men 
and women in just such a way as has been indicated. 
Some will choose one of them, others will choose 
others. Perhaps they all need just a word of warning, 
lest in their eager zeal they may be inclined to under- 
estimate each other's value and service to the commu- 
nity and suppose that nobody is doing much to move the 
universe unless he has his shoulder hard pressed against 
their own particular wheels. We get so impressed 
with the great and far-reaching importance of our own 
special line of effort, that we see everything around us 
in its relation to it, and those persons who fail to be so 
much impressed with its momentous nature seem to us 
to be very blind indeed, while it is more than possible 
that they are blaming us for our blindness and indif- 
ference on exactly similar grounds. 

It is not to be wondered at that the earnest and 
sincere reformer, impressed with the vital importance 
of his reform, and accepting something of the claim 
of the Church, to which he has been accustomed to 



178 THE CHURCH AXD EKFORMS. 

look with respect, to be the leader of the world, 
should expect that Church to take up the champion- 
ship of his reform, should consider such championship 
really demanded of the Church by loyalty to its own 
position and claims, and should feel that the Church 
is untrue to itseK and unjust to him when it does not 
show readiness to take its place as such a champion. 
We may be able to see presently that in a very real and 
true sense the Church may be the mother of reforms, 
and it certainly is the duty of the Church to wage 
aggressive and unrelenting warfare against sin and 
wrong ; but only a little consideration will show that 
it cannot possibly enter the lists as the champion of 
particular reforms in any such way as the reformers 
would so often desire. The actual and specific work 
of the Church must, of course, be done by individual 
ministers and parishes. Parish and minister cannot 
throw themselves into some specific work of this kind, 
for the reason that they cannot cover the whole field, 
and must not narrow themselves to one corner of it. 
The minister, being only a man after all, cannot be 
an all-around reformer for the reasons already stated. 
If he means to give his time and energy in any direct 
way to reform work, it must be to one reform. Which 
one ? Whose ? Why one rather than another ? In 
his position he cannot choose without seeming to 
imply a recognition of the superior importance of one 
and to ignore the just claims of others. Such action 
can only produce discord and just objection. More- 
over, though minister and people should ever have 
the highest resj^ect for every effort calculated to 
uplift humanity and improve its condition and sur- 



THE CHURCH AND REFORMS. 179 

roundings, they should never lose sight of the fact, 
and never recede a single step from the claim, that 
the Church of Christ is not only larger than any 
reform, but larger than all the reforms together. 
The temperance reform is a great and holy thing, but 
temperance is only one side of a complete character 
after all, and a man may be entirely temperate and 
yet a thorough-paced scoundrel. So with all the 
reforms. They are all vastly important, but none of 
them is inclusive. Each deals with a part of human 
nature, a segment of the great circle of humanity's 
environment. The business of the Church is thor- 
oughgoing and inclusive. It deals with the whole 
man and with all of his life. Its effort must underlie 
and comprehend all other effort. It must furnish 
the soil and the atmosphere out of which and in 
which other effort shall grow and flourish. These 
specific reforms are the business of the laity, of the 
earnest and consecrated individual men and women. 
They should take their places in the work wherever 
their abilities and inclinations shall determine for 
them. They are right in regarding their work as 
important. They would be right in regarding it as 
holy. The Church should furnish them with strength 
and inspiration. It should not be the direct associate 
of one, but the inspirer and vitalizer of all. The 
Church as an organization, the minister as its official 
head, should generate and supply the force that in- 
spires, vitalizes, and makes potent all efforts at reform. 
The individual member, or the reformer who is not 
organically connected with the Church, should look to 
it for inspiration, for energy, for vitality. He should 



180 THE CHTJECH AKD EEFORMS. 

regard his reform work as a part of his Church work, 
the specific application which he is making to the 
needs of humanity of the power of the gospel and the 
spirit which that gospel has put into his soul. The 
relation of the Church to the reforms is that of 
the great dynamos in our modern electric power sta- 
tions to the special instruments which serve the 
needs of men. The central dynamo is not a motor, 
nor a lamp, nor a heater. These are entirely separate 
and distinct instruments, different in construction and 
specific in operation. Yet the central dynamo fur- 
nishes the power which moves them all, each in its 
own place and way. It is useless without them, for 
there is nothing to be gained by generating electricity 
unless we have the lamp, or the motor, or some other 
machine which shall apply it to our needs, and they 
are useless without it, for lamp and motor and all the 
rest are but dead glass and metal unless the connec- 
tion with the central power supply is maintained 
unimpaired. 

That the Church has always been faithful to its 
proper responsibilities in this matter is not claimed. 
After all the deduction necessary has been made on 
account of wrong ideas as to what that obligation is 
and unwise and unreasonable demands as to how its 
influence ought to be exercised, it remains true that 
the conservatism and timidity of the Church have 
often paralyzed its efforts, and its shortsighted and 
unwise limitation of its own duties and activities to 
the concerns of the hereafter, and to a single side of 
human activity here, has often blinded its eyes to 
responsibility and to opportunity. AYhat the Church 



THE CHURCH AKD REFORMS. 181 

can do, however, to realize its possibilities, to help 
humanity, and to further reforms ought not to be diffi- 
cult to see. In the first place, the Church must be 
insistent in the faithful preaching of that personal 
righteousness which is fundamental to all real reform 
of any kind, sort or description. This statement is 
not mere commonplace rehearsal of platitude. It is 
indeed old and familiar, and yet it needs to-day to be 
made and made again with patience and persistence. 
It needs to be made for two reasons : first, because the 
Church does not fully recognize the importance of per- 
sonal righteousness as the end and aim of its endeavor, 
and, second, because neither the Church nor the world 
has come to any adequate comprehension of the indis- 
pensableness of personal and individual righteousness 
to any solid advance along the line of betterment of 
general conditions. 

The Church has again and again failed to hold 
firmly to the great law of the necessity of righteous- 
ness in the individual. It has repeatedly allowed 
itself to be diverted to the pursuit of other ends. 
There can be no reasonable doubt of the enormous 
importance of organization and of the debt that Chris- 
tianity and the world owes to the support which the 
Church of Christ received from the tight bands of its 
older ecclesiastical organization in the days when its 
popular weakness on the intellectual side rendered 
some external support necessary. But the Church 
has very often made the mistake of losing sight of the 
true meaning and value' of organization and of suppos- 
ing that loyalty to the organization and enjoyment of 
the official benefits, favor and benediction of that or- 



182 THE CHTJECH AND EEFORMS. 

ganization were the ends which the individual w^as to 
seek in his religious life and would be sufficient for 
all his spiritual needs in this world or in the world to 
come. This was and is one of the greatest faults of 
Catholicism, but the Catholic Church is not the only- 
one burdened with it. Protestantism fell heir to it, 
and, though it is in conflict with the spirit of this age 
and therefore constantly losing its hold, it is still 
influential with many minds. In so far as organization 
makes the Church more efficient in the doing of its 
work and helps the individual in the use and appro- 
priation of Christian advantages and opportunities so 
that he may be edified in righteousness and made help- 
ful in the edification of others, it is greatly to be desired 
and highly to be praised, but when it becomes a formal 
and mechanical substitute for the things of the spirit, 
as the tithing of the mint, anise and cummin once were 
for the weightier matters of the law, then it becomes 
a delusion and a snare, a pitfall in the way of the 
seeker after life. How often have we heard the old 
cry of " No salvation outside the Church ! " how often 
listened to the teaching that the sacraments are the 
gates of heaven, gates opening only at the magic touch 
of the keys once entrusted to the disciples I How often, 
even to-day, do we hear the people urged to seek the 
membership and communion of the Church of Christ 
as if that formal enlistment in the army of the Lord 
were the be-all and the end-all of the soul's immortal 
life ! Certainly we cannot urge men too zealously to 
stand up and be counted for righteousness, certainly 
we cannot present the advantages to self and fellows 
of membership of Christ's visible Church in too strong 



THE CHURCH AND REFORMS. 183 

a light or in too glowing colors, and yet we shall greatly 
err if we allow ourselves for one instant to regard it 
as anything but a means to a great and glorious end. 
Who needs to be reminded that the Church has stag- 
gered for centuries under the burden of unworthy 
members who have regarded their membership of it 
as a spiritual finality, and so regarding it have paid so 
little heed to the demands of personal righteousness 
that their life and walk have been a by-word of re- 
proach among the unchurched? Who needs to be 
reminded that the most unreserved allegiance and 
loyalty to the ecclesiastical organization and the most 
scrupulous performance of all the externals of religion 
are as fully compatible with a vile life and an evil 
character to-day as they were in the day when our 
Lord stripped the mask of pretence from the sancti- 
monious faces of the self-righteous Pharisees, showed 
them and the world what they really were, whited 
sepulchres, fair without but within full of dead men's 
bones and corruption ? 

It was a great day for humanity when stout old 
Martin Luther unsheathed the ancient sword of the 
spirit and declared that man was saved by faith if at 
all, but the sun of that day was soon obscured by the 
mists of error when the Church lost sight of the true 
meaning of faith, confounding it with the merely intel- 
lectual operation of belief in a doctrine and set out on 
its spectre-hunt for a statement of doctrine that should 
for all time fulfil the requirement of being the truth, 
the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The Church 
has since then only too often frittered away its time 
and energy in trying to teach men what to believe 



184 THE CHURCH ANB EEFOKMS. 

when it should have been using all its powers in 
teaching men how to live. It is indeed true that ideas 
lie at the roots of conduct, that as a man thinketh in 
his heart so is he, but it is true also that selfishness 
and sordidness of life are as entirely compatible with 
the orthodoxy which consists of unreserved profes- 
sion of a creed as they have so often been proved to 
be with the orthodoxy which consists of unreserved 
loyalty to the ecclesiastical organization and its au- 
thorized representatives. Indeed, the Church is not 
primarily a teaching organization. It must teach, 
indeed, but the teaching is not its primary business. 
The Church is an inspiring organization. Christ was 
the way, the truth and the life, the purpose of his 
mission was one of instruction only so far as instruc- 
tion was needed in order that men might have life 
and have it more abundantly. The knowledge that 
concerns life is within the province of the Church, and 
when the Church has quickened the spiritual life and 
stirred to energy the dormant spiritual desires, the 
knowledge will be eagerly sought and will somehow 
be found. Polemical and philosophical sermons are 
less preached to-day than they once were, but it is a 
question whether they are not preached even now 
more than they ought to be. If we may accept the 
statements of the students of old New England life, 
the sermons of our ancestors rarely had to do with 
anything except the knotty and difficult points of the- 
ology and the dreadful consequences which waited on 
a failure to apprehend correctly their exact meaning. 
They used to be told that good works were not to 
be trusted, that they were dangerous and mislead- 



THE CHURCH AND REFORMS. 185 

ing, puffing the doer up wifh a false conceit of merit, 
and that the only thing that had efficacy was a pin- 
ning of one's faith on the atonement made for him by 
Christ and a faithful effort to believe fully and faith- 
fully the things laid down in the standards of the 
Church. The faint echoes of the old thunder still roll 
through the preaching that tells us that the merely 
moral man is hateful to God and in danger of the 
punishments of the hereafter if he has not professed 
his allegiance to Christ in some way prescribed for 
him by the authority of the ancients and that there is 
no possible hope, here or hereafter, for the pagan who 
has not heard of the Saviour, no matter how true he 
may have been to the light that has shone around his 
life. The Church must learn to put all these things 
in their proper places and insist upon personal right- 
eousness. If it is necessary to denounce and disci- 
pline the unworthy individual, it should be done firmly 
and unsparingly. The only possible ecclesiastical trial 
in these days ought to be for personal unrighteous- 
ness, not for heresy. The divorce between religion 
and morality can no longer be tolerated. It began in 
error, continues in stupidity and will end in disaster, 
if the parties cannot be reunited. The Church must 
accept the position that not enrolment on its lists, 
nor loyalty to its oi-ganization and clergy, nor ortho- 
doxy of belief, nor scrupulosity in ceremonial worship 
are the ends of its effort, but the larger spiritual life 
and the more perfect righteousness of the individual. 
All these other things, organization and hierarchy and 
creed and ceremonial and prayer and praise and pub- 
lic observance of worship, are but the helps to the 
accomplishment of that one great end. 



186 THE CHUECH AND EEFOEMS. 

The Cliurcli has not yet adequately taught, nor the 
world learned, that no reform is possible save on the 
basis of personal righteousness. Keformer after re- 
former rises and labors and passes away disappointed 
without the slightest apparent recognition of this most 
important fact. What hope is there that the public 
will take active measures for the suppression of the 
drink evil as long as the great majority of men in most 
communities are users of drink in some degree ? 
Will they not all feel like the clergyman who said 
that he could not forbid the workingman his saloon 
while he himself dined at the club with his bishop ? 
What hope is there for political reform when party 
leaders do not hesitate to avail themselves in private 
of the abuses they denounce in public, and party fol- 
lowers have learned to consider such conduct brilliant 
strategy ? In a previous lecture the attempt was 
made to show that all the difficulties and abuses of 
the labor question came from the faults of character 
so common among men, and the claim was confidently 
made that the road to the final solution of the ques- 
tion lay through the amelioration or the removal of 
those faults. Every reform is called for by the exis- 
tence of an abuse. An abuse must be the result of 
either ignorance or wickedness, or both. In the few 
cases where the difficulty is ignorance alone, it is 
easily removed by letting in the light of modern 
knowledge. The reforms that halt and drag, the re- 
forms that try courage and patience to the utmost, 
the reforms that are aimed at inveterate and persist- 
ent evils, find their opposition deeply rooted in human 
perversity and human wickedness. Somehow or an- 



THE CHUECH AND REFORMS. 187 

other we must manage to break up those conditions 
and substitute righteousness for that unrighteousness, 
or our work is in vain. The collective unit is not and 
cannot be better than the individual unit, and there is 
no hope whatever that reforms can prosper or society 
be regenerated except on the basis of individual right- 
eousness. All the political and philosophical schem- 
ing in the world will not make life easy and society 
pure as long as the individual lives a life centred in 
self, directed toward the gratification of the senses, 
swayed by passion and prejudice and dominated by 
lust. We do not go deep enough with our reforms. 
We persist in chasing the ignis fatuus of collective, 
legal and social reformations which shall make all 
things fair but shall not interfere with the individuaPs 
license to do exactly as he pleases. We sympathize 
with reform movements just so long as their progress 
implies no criticism on our life or actions. When 
consistent sympathy and effective co-operation require 
some change in 'our own lives and demand the giving 
up of our own habits, we are very likely to refer the 
whole matter to the Legislature, or to declare that it 
is the unpractical dream of a handful of cranks. The 
Church can do no better service to the world, and no 
agency can better serve the cause of all reforms, than 
by holding up to the world this naked fact, stripped 
of all disguises and freed from all evasions, that re- 
form means righteousness, no matter how much of 
criticism, of condemnation or of sacrifice such right- 
eousness may demand. Humanity loves to think that 
it is right, but its conditions are wrong and oppressive. 
It needs to learn the sometimes unpleasant fact that 



188 THE CHURCH AND REFORMS. 

it makes its own conditions, and tliat whatever is 
wrong or oppressive in those conditions is the result 
of its own shortcomings and will disappear when 
those shortcomings are corrected. 

But the Church must not content itself with preach- 
ing the personal righteousness which is fundamental 
to reform, or even with showing that it is so funda- 
mental. It must impress upon all those under its 
inJB-uence the converse of that fact ; that is, that per- 
sonal righteousness which is real and true and not 
the hoUowest kind of a pretence will manifest itself 
in effort for the improvement of humanity's life and 
conditions. Personal righteousness is not a private 
and individual possession. It is a power in the soul, 
a force that must manifest itself in activity. The 
aim of the Church is not to make beautiful lay figures, 
adorn them with the Christian virtues and keep them 
in glass cases for the admiring observation of the 
world without. It is to make strong and active and 
vigorous men and women, who shall be armed with 
the sword and spear as well as with the shield and 
helmet of righteousness, and shall never be able to be 
content while their hands are withheld from active 
work in good causes. That religion which consists 
in going to church on Sunday and doing no harm on 
week days, and contents itself to let the world run on 
about as it will, is not the kind of religion that Christ 
had in mind when he commanded his disciples to go 
forth and make disciples of all the nations. Men 
used to think and preach that the salvation of one's 
own soul from the flames and pains of hell was a 
sufficient task to take all the time and absorb all the 



THE CHURCH AND REFORMS. 189 

energies of any human being. It seemed to them so 
difficult and so complicated a process that it is not 
to be wondered at that their religion was so largely 
self-centred. The larger and better thought of to-day 
is comprehending somewhat better the largeness of the 
gospel of Christ, and is beginning to see that its mes- 
sage to man is a larger one than the call to a personal 
salvation, but old beliefs die hard, and it is not matter 
for much surprise that pulpit and pews halt and falter 
on the way to the position that a merely personal 
religion, a religion that sucks up all the dews of grace 
like a sponge, and keeps them for the watering of 
one's own heart only, is not the religion that God re- 
quires or Jesus taught. It is not gracious to indulge in 
over- much of criticism of methods, nor should we pre- 
sume to judge the intentions of those who seem to us 
to err, but it is cause for some surprise and more disap- 
pointment to find that there are so many churches 
even to-day which seem content to train their members 
and converts to raise their voices in conference and 
testimony meetings, and do not seem to care greatly 
whether or not they manifest their religious zeal and 
their love for God's creatures in active work in the 
line of the great moral and reformatory movements 
of the day. The teaching of the Church ought to be 
firm and consistent that the only faith worth having 
is the faith that shows itself by its works, that the 
most acceptable worship is a life spent in effort for 
others, and that the life which shows no fruit of labor 
in the cause of humanity, labor rooted and grounded 
in love to God and man, is an unfruitful branch, fit 
only for the pruning-knife of the great Husbandman, 



190 THE CHUHCH AND EEFORMS. 

that it may be purged to the bearing of its proper 
fruit. 

The failure of the Church to teach this lesson fur- 
nishes whatever of legitimate ground there is for the 
suspicion and aversion with which reformers have 
come to regard it. It has not recognized the indis- 
soluble wedlock of religion and morality, it has not 
recognized the larger aspects and the aggressive qual- 
ity of religion in the life, and it has not properly 
impressed upon its followers the fact that they should 
make profession of their faith by their work in good 
causes. The reformer is neither wise nor reasonable 
when he demands that the Church should espouse the 
championship of his particular reform, but he is right 
and reasonable when he demands that the Church 
shall teach its members that personal righteousness 
must imply sympathy and co-operation with reform- 
atory effort. The point of contact of the Church and 
the reform lies just here. It is through this contact 
that the inspiring force of Christianity should so flow 
into all reformatory effort that it should recognize the 
Church as the source of its power and the unfailing 
well-spring of its energy. The Church, through all 
its agencies of influence, pulpit and press, Sunday- 
school and prayer-meeting, should strive to stir men 
to active effort for the promotion of public righteous- 
ness, — that is, for reform, — not specifying the direc- 
tion of that effort, nor dictating the line of reformatory 
work the individual shall take, but filling his soul 
with that resistless, eager enthusiasm, that irrepress- 
ible conviction of duty Avhich shall force him to cry 
aloud, '' Woe is me if I preach not the gospel ! " That 



THE CHUECH AND REFORMS. l91 

done, it will be safe to leave him to decide whether 
he shall preach the gospel of temperance, or of equal 
suffrage, or of political reform, or of social purifi- 
cation, or what not. 

The sympathy with reforms aroused would not only 
be intense and effective, but would have the additional 
merit of being selective. The real cause of reform 
suffers much from the extravagances and vagaries of 
persons who suppose themselves to be reformers when 
they are not really so. Fads and notions are not re- 
forms. Change is not necessarily reform. The true 
spirit of reform is not manifested in zeal in commend- 
ing everything that happens to be new and condemning 
everything that happens to be old. There are new 
things that are not worth having, and old things that 
the world can never spare. The trouble with these 
unwise enthusiasms is that they are neither founded 
on principle nor directed by thought. The reformatory 
enthusiasm which springs from the inspiration of the 
Church, and is the manifestation of the reformer's 
religious life, is conspicuously endowed with just those 
saving qualities. It has its anchorage on the firm 
rock-bottom of tried and tested truth, an anchorage 
that will not fail in any storm. The Christian re- 
former has a zeal according to knowledge. He is in- 
spired with a true conception of what conditions are 
desirable, and not merely with a dissatisfied notion 
that present conditions are unsatisfactory. He has 
some definite conception of the sort of manhood that 
is desirable and of the kind of social state most to be 
sought by man, and his efforts are guided by these 
conceptions. The offered projects of reform are tested 



192 THE CHURCH AND REFORMS. 

by these definite and everlasting standards and if they 
conform to them they will enlist his sympathy, but if 
they are simply the self-indulgent schemes of ambition 
and selfishness and impatience of restraint they will 
be condemned by him, as they should be by all. Un- 
wise conservatism and unwise zeal are largely the 
common results of lack of thought. Thoughtfulness 
in such matters serves the double purpose of the gen- 
erator and the controller of energy. The true Chris- 
tian will be thoughtful about these things because his 
thought will be constantly stimulated by the instruc- 
tion he will receive, and his mind will be under con- 
stant influence in the direction of sober and thoughtful 
consideration of important themes. The Church tries 
to teach men how to live, and it tries hard to teach 
them to think. It recognizes no foe to righteous- 
ness more potent than thoughtlessness and no ally 
more helpful than thoughtful habits. Its constant 
appeal to men is to think, to think of .their own high 
calling and destiny, to think of their neighbors and 
their neighbors' needs, to think of God and his right- 
eousness, to think of the methods by which they can 
help to bring about the answer to their own most 
common prayer, the petition that his kingdom come 
and his will be done in earth as it is in heaven. And 
so their reforming zeal, their earnest desire to bring 
in that divine kingdom on earth, is solid and true in 
its foundations because it is founded on the righteous- 
ness of God and on his plans for the elevation and 
perfection of his children, and it is steady and effective 
in its progress because it is guided by sober thought 
through method to end and not led by passion and 



THE CHURCH AND REFORMS. 193 

prejudice on a wild witch-dance of experiment and 
innovation. 

And, lastly, the Church can and does make great 
contribution to the cause of reform of all sorts by its 
interpretation of the facts and conditions of life in 
the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the standard 
of life made evident by him. As has been stated in 
previous lectures, the great need of humanity is never 
so much instruction in the unfamiliar as interpretation 
of the common and familiar. We do not understand 
ourselves or our surroundings. We do not know 
whether they are good, bad or indifferent till some 
discerning power or personality has interpreted them 
to us. No man knows the ethical values of his own 
life till he has had that life interpreted to him and 
measured for him by some standard external to him- 
self. The average sinner, as the world goes, is pretty 
well satisfied with himself. It is not until the actual 
accomplishment and the possible accomplishment of 
his life are thrown into sharp and perhaps agonizing 
contrast by the interpretation of that life in the clear 
light of a true conception of manhood, that he awakes 
to the facts of the case and comes out of the grave of 
his ignorance into a resurrection, perhaps a resurrec- 
tion of bitterest condemnation, self-imposed and self- 
accepted. The ethical values of our social systems 
are not made evident till some keen-visioned intelli- 
gence has interpreted them to us. We are not con- 
scious of the blots and patches on our systems of life 
and thought till the light of the ideally perfect has 
been turned to them and we have become able to com- 
pare them as they are with themselves as they ought 



194 THE CHURCH AND REFOBMS. 

to be. We long accepted slavery and polygamy and 
woman^s enforced inferiority and social abuses and 
oppressions without number, without a thought of 
their essential iniquity till some higher intelligences 
interpreted them to us and we saw what they really 
were. We were not always promptly obedient to the 
heavenly vision, but the time came, as it must always 
come, when the higher thought prevailed and we tried 
to remodel these things on the line of the revealed 
and interpreted possibilities of human society. The 
first step in reform must always be a perception of the 
wrongness of existing conditions. That perception 
must be more than a mere dissatisfaction. Dissatis- 
faction may as readily be the chafing of a low soul 
against wholesome restraint as the struggle of a high 
soul for emancipation from degrading conditions. The 
perception of wrong that shall lead to reform and 
betterment must come from a true and sound inter- 
pretation of the conditions, a trying of them by the 
highest standards known or attainable, a relentless 
turning upon them of the cold, white light of truth 
that shall pierce every hidden fold of them and make 
clearly visible every seam and stain and spot. The 
human mind is so constituted that when it becomes 
really convinced that things are wrong, whether within 
or without itself, it is driven by an uncontrollable and 
irresistible impulse to set about the righting of them. 
There is no power, personality or intelligence on earth 
so well fitted as the Church of Christ to do this neces- 
sary work of interpreting the conditions of life, show- 
ing what conditions are weights crushing men into the 
mire of degradation and what the needed restraints 



THE CHURCH AND REFORMS. 195 

upon human passion, and furnishing the materials for 
discrimination between true and false reform and for 
guidance in carrying out the reforms that wisdom and 
righteousness approve. The Church has the highest 
standards of personal and civic righteousness. It has 
the everlasting principles of right and wrong. It 
has the mind and heart of God as revealed progres- 
sively since the world began. It has the gospel of 
Jesus Christ. It has these priceless treasures in 
earthen vessels, it is true, but it has them, and that 
is the important truth. It has no exclusive monopoly 
of the truth and is not the only agency God has com- 
missioned for the uplifting of his children, but it has 
the largest deposit of truth and the largest commission 
for duty that have yet been entrusted to human hands. 
When human lives are measured by its standards, their 
faults and failures are revealed, but their possibilities 
are at the same time made evident and the soul of 
the sinner is stirred to the search for life with God. 
When human customs and social systems are measured 
by its standards and exposed to the light of its truth, 
their imperfections are made manifest, their pitiful 
compromises and futile self-indulgences are revealed, 
but the possibilities of higher and better things are 
made visible, the need of reform is made evident, the 
spirit of reform is generated, the motive power of 
reform is supplied, the end and direction of reform 
are pointed out. And so all along the line, in the per- 
ception of needs, in the fixing of ends, in the adoption 
of methods, in the performance of the work, there is 
need that the Church and the reforms should draw 
nearer together. The Church should bend its knowl- 



196 THE CHTJKCH AISTD EEFOEMS. 

edge to tlie interpretation of life, direct the minds and 
hearts of its members to the consideration of the re- 
vealed needs of life, use all its consecrated zeal for the 
uplifting of life in every direction where degradation 
shall appear. The reformer needs a larger view of the 
value of Christian interpretations of humanity's needs, 
a wiser conception of the province of the Church as 
the nursing mother of reforms, a closer and more 
trustful reliance on the inspiring and uplifting power 
of a sound religious faith as the true generator of the 
motive power that shall make reforms possible and 
carry them on triumphantly to their final consumma- 
tion in a purified and redeemed society, a kingdom of 
God on earth, a new Jerusalem come down out of the 
heavens to bless and adorn the earth below. 



VIII. 
THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 



Perhaps the title of this address may be a little 
misleading, from the fact that the whole series has 
been an attempt to deal with some of the relations of 
the Church to society in the larger acceptation of the 
term, while this is an effort to trace the special rela- 
tion which the Church could and should bear to what 
is commonly known as society in the narrow and 
technical sense of the term. These lectures have 
grown out of a keen appreciation of the fact that the 
sphere of the activity of the Christian Church is far 
narrower than it should be, partly because it has hesi- 
tated to push its claims as it ought, partly because 
earnest and thoughtful men have not appreciated its 
capabilities any better than it has itself, and partly 
because the worldly and unrighteous forces in human 
society are constantly striving to push it back upon 
itself, encourage its mistakes and destroy popular 
confidence in it. Coupled with this is a firm convic- 
tion that the Church not only ought to hold a far 
different and far more commanding position, but that 

197 



198 THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 

under wise and intelligent leadership it easily could 
hold such a position. Indeed, the conditions are fast 
becoming such that a forward step must be taken or 
the consequences may be disastrous. There is no 
doubt whatever of the final triumph of the divine 
plans, but it is not to be forgotten that that triumph 
does not necessarily involve the perpetuity or success 
of any particular agency. The coming of the kingdom 
of heaven upon earth does not necessarily imply the 
victory of the Church as at present visibly and for- 
mally organized. There are many persons who say 
that the days of the Church's existence are numbered 
and those of its usefulness already past. It is by no 
means necessary to give up effort in despair because 
of the dark but confident predictions of these prophets 
of evil, but it is not wise to listen too trustfully to the 
counter-prediction of those who place a confidence in 
the Church which would be admirable if it were more 
intelligent as to the true foundation on which it ought 
to rest, and who close our eyes and ears to the warn- 
ings of coming disaster by the assurance with which 
they claim that, come what may, the Church is God's 
favored instrument and must finally rise superior to 
all its foes. Certainly that victory can never come 
till the Church has stretched the hand of its powerful 
influence into every part of human life and made its 
power felt in every department of human activity. 
The whole man is not raised into God-like power and 
purity by laboring at one-tenth of his life and not only 
leaving the other nine-tenths to be the sport of what- 
ever influences may chance to play upon them, but 
even deliberately cutting them off from any connection 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 199 

with the life-giving power which is poured into the 
small remainder by the false and mischievous distinc- 
tions which we draw, and suffer to be drawn, between 
the sacred and the secular in life. Some effort has 
been made to show what might be done and ought 
to be done in some of the more serious and active 
of human relations, but there is another side of 
human life which no less needs the uplifting and in- 
spiring power of Christianity. Man divides his time 
between work and play, between what may perhaps be 
called inclusively business, what we sometimes call 
the serious business of life, and that intercourse with 
his friends and neighbors which we call society, in the 
narrower use of that term. It is that narrower use of 
the term ^^ society " which is contemplated in the title 
of the present lecture. We have tried to see how the 
Church can help men to work more wisely and more 
effectually ; let us now try to see how it can help 
them to play more temperately, more wisely and, con- 
sequently, more restfully. 

But let us be careful not to restrict the meaning of 
our word too much. The word " society,'' as referring 
to the intercourse of men in their relaxation and in 
their amusements, commonly conjures up the vision of 
wealth, refinement, ancestry, what we commonly call 
position. When we speak of a person as being in 
society, we are apt to think of him as a member of a 
certain limited and exclusive circle. When we say a 
man has no society, or is not in society, we have 
reference to the same select circles. But it must be 
remembered that people have social relations who have 
neither wealth nor refinement, neither ancestry nor 



200 THE CHUECH AND SOCIETY. 

reputation. The mill-owner has his society, but his 
humblest operative has his as well. The tenements in 
New York have their society as well as the cottages 
at Newport. Kich and poor, high and low, all play 
when work is over, and all play in pretty much the 
same way after all. There are differences in the 
scenery and costumes and stage effects ; differences, 
too, in the manner of the actors and the way in which 
they play their parts, but the play does not greatly 
vary. The ends sought are the very same, and the 
means of seeking them are a great deal more nearly 
identical than one might at first glance imagine. 
This play is by no means necessarily wrong. But it 
is not to be denied that it opens the door to much 
that is wrong and demoralizing. Man is a social 
animal. When he seeks the company of his fellows 
for pleasure he simply obeys the same law of his 
nature which causes him to seek them for mutual 
protection, for combination of effort, and even for 
worship. Man does nothing alone. From the earn- 
ing of his daily bread to the worship of his God, he 
does all things in company with his fellows. Men, 
like other animals, play together. Their social inter- 
course, in the sense in which we are now using the 
term, is largely for relaxation and amusement. It is 
a search after pleasure, and pleasure, unless wisely 
and intelligently sought, degenerates into mere self- 
indulgence. Is it to be wondered at that the human 
animal does not always play wisely ? Ought we to 
be surprised that when a man gives himself up, even 
for a little while, to the gratification of his desire for 
happiness, for pleasure, as he generally translates 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 201 

happiness, lie looses the reins of his passions and 
seeks that pleasure through the gratification of his 
senses merely ? And so the gates are open for the 
entrance of a thousand evil things. It is not easy to 
throw off the habit of self-indulgence, once one has 
contracted it. It is not easy for a man who has 
allowed the social side of his life to become a mere 
scramble for a good time to keep his passions in sub- 
jection, to centre his thought on higher things than 
himself, to retain his thoughtfulness for others or to 
rise to the possibility of a great self-sacrifice. It does 
not follow that man should deny his natural instincts, 
withdraw from his fellows, make himself an unsocial 
being and deny himself the relaxation of happiness, 
or even of pleasure. It does follow, however, that he 
should somehow be helped to take his pleasures more 
wisely, to make- them sources of refreshment, as they 
were intended to be, and not of dissipation and loss of 
power, as they too often are. 

It is much to be questioned whether the common 
attitude of the Church with regard to this side of 
human life has been altogether a wise one. In its 
fear lest it should fail to keep itself unspotted from 
the world, it has withdrawn from that world, not more 
than our Lord withdrew from it and advised his 
disciples to withdraw from it, but in a far different 
way. It is true that there is much that is vain and 
frivolous in the ordinary diversions and occupations 
of society. The Church has commonly jumped to the 
conclusion that society was all necessarily given over 
to evil, and there was and could be no good in it. 
It has denounced, abhorred and utterly condemned 



202 THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 

society and all its works. It has declared that its 
thoughts were vain and worldly, its amusements 
vicious and harmful, its whole life inspired by the 
spirit of evil. It has exhorted its followers to forsake 
these things, to eschew the fellowship of the world's 
people, to associate only with those like-minded with 
themselves and to devote their whole lives to their 
more sober business. We certainly hardly need to be 
reminded of the austerities of the past in our own 
land, a past not without its pleasures indeed, but 
enlivened for the most part with pleasures which, if 
taken at all, could only be taken properly, as a witty 
Frenchman once said the English folk took all their 
pleasures, sadly. And, indeed, when we come to study 
the lives of those men and women who devote them- 
selves to the ordinary pursuits of the social world, no 
matter how high or low their rank in life, as such 
matters are ordinarily rated, we shall see abundant 
justification for the conviction of the members and 
leaders of the Church that all is not right with them. 
He who yields himself to the pleasures and dissipa- 
tions of society finds soon that they Avill absorb all 
his time. The desire for excitement is one of those 
things which grows more and more insatiable the 
more it is indulged. The mere pleasure-seeker soon 
finds his pleasures palling on his taste, but as they 
cease to amuse him the desire for amusement grows 
constantly more intense. There is no man driven by 
half so intense a thirst for pleasure as the broken- 
down roue whose jaded and worn senses no longer 
yield readily to their accustomed stimuli. So the 
pleasure-seeker wants his pleasure constantly more 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 203 

and more highly seasoned, till it passes beyond the 
control of his better thought, and leads him into 
excesses at whose very suggestion he would once have 
blushed. These are extreme cases it is true, but it 
is to be remembered that it is the extreme cases 
that mark the dangerous tendencies. It is certainly 
neither an extreme nor an uncommon case to find 
persons whose whole time, or at least as much of it as 
can be spared from the absolutely inevitable duties of 
bread-winning, is devoted to the search for amuse- 
ment. Every spare hour of day or night must be 
spent in some public place of amusement or in the 
company of friends at home. There are no quiet 
hours with books, no quiet talks of two or three 
together, the talks that to a wise man are as refresh- 
ing and as helpful as the springs in the desert oases 
are to the weary traveller, no Sundays of worship, 
no times of lofty thought. These things have ceased 
to charm, have come to be regarded as tedious and 
most unendurable bores, to be shuddered at always 
and escaped from whenever possible. Every hour 
must have its something going on, its excitement, its 
diverting occupation. The habit of wasting time 
becomes so fixed that the spendthrift, like all other 
spendthrifts, loses all thought of the value of the 
precious thing he is wasting, and "killing time'' 
becomes the most carefully cultivated of all the arts 
of life. 

Concurrent with the absorption of time is the com- 
plete absorption of thought. The man or woman who 
has become a devotee of pleasure, a seeker and lover 
of the diversions of society, is liable neither to read, 



204 THE CHURCH A^D SOCIETY. 

thinkj pray nor love. He has no care for literature : 
it is a bore. He has no care for thought : it wearies 
him. He has no interest in prayer, because his soul 
has gone a long way at least toward losing its power 
to grasp at anything higher than the things of the 
body. He has no thought about his neighbors and no 
care for those who need his help, because his remnant 
of a mind is fully occupied with his own concerns. 
His easy good-nature, his dislike to be bored or his 
aversion to being compelled to recognize unpleasant 
things may lead him to fling a coin to a beggar or to 
put his name on a subscription list, but of the meaning 
of the word " charity " he is without the slightest real 
conception. The hardest man to reach and touch, to 
enrich and interest in any good cause, whether of re- 
ligion, charity or reform, is your mere shallow world- 
ling. In spite of his advantages, he is harder to reach 
with a high thought than his poor and ignorant neigh- 
bor. In spite of what may be the general inoffensive- 
ness of his life, he is harder to Christianize than many 
a sinner. In spite of his comfort, he has less that he 
feels that he can spare for others than many a man 
whose day's wages he would waste in five minutes with- 
out a second thought. Indeed, it is on the financial 
side that the pressure is often most keenly felt. Who 
has not heard and seen the straits men get themselves 
into because of the demands society makes on their 
pocket-books ? The aping of those who are richer, the 
ceaseless striving to outshine one's companions, the 
imperiously-felt necessity of keeping up the pace set 
by one's associates, the countless and endless extrava- 
gances and dissipations of social life as it is so often 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 205 

followed, are enormous burdens on the shoulders of 
men. To say nothing of the wrong-doing into which 
men are so often led by these things, there is an entire 
absorption for selfish purposes of means which often 
ought to be amply sufficient to support the possessor 
in comfort and fill his hands for the doing of much 
most excellent and most-needed work. 

But enough of these matters. It is not intended to 
add another voice to the chorus of denunciation of 
society, nor to declare any belief in the entirely lost 
state of all those who have not withdrawn themselves 
from its wiles. Enough has been said to remind our- 
selves that, however wise or otherwise its consequent 
action, the Church has not been altogether wrong in 
fearing for its followers the effects of too great devo- 
tion to matters which so commonly lead to such dire 
results. That the search after pleasure is the great 
highway by which sin enters the human soul cannot 
be questioned. That the social life of men is largely 
a matter of pleasure-seeking and relaxation is most 
evident. That it may very easily be so abused as to 
become itself an open door for sin is hardly open to 
dispute. The question comes upon the course of the 
Church in the face of the existing conditions. Three 
courses are open. The Church may discourage and 
condemn society and demand the withdrawal of its 
followers from all participation in it. It may seek to 
make itself a social centre and provide for the social 
life of its members in accordance with methods which 
have its approval. It may accept society as it is, take 
account of its capabilities — if it have any beyond 
those commonly realized — and try to mould it and 



206 THE CHURCH ANT> SOCIETY. 

use it so as, if possible, to make it an added agency 
for tlie growth of humanity. The first course it has 
pursued a great deal. The second is not unknown to 
it. The third has not been tried much systematically 
and openly, but has not infrequently been the real 
practice, not with intention but under compulsion of 
the logic of the situation and as the result of condi- 
tions that could not readily be either altered or escaped. 
The first alternative seems perhaps the simplest and 
most easily practised. It labors, however, under cer- 
tain very great disadvantages. In the first place, it 
ignores and overrides a prominent natural character- 
istic of humanity, — its social instincts. The natural 
instincts of humanity are not in themselves evil. 
They are part of that nature which its Heavenly 
Father gave it. They offer great possibilities of evil 
and of good. If they are perverted, left uncontrolled, 
allowed to degenerate into lusts, they are the parents 
of much harm. If they are placed under subjection 
to the higher spiritual activities enlisted in the service 
of all that is good and pure, developed so as to bring 
out all their helpful and elevating possibilities, they 
are productive of inestimable good. Indeed, the sins 
of humanity in large measure are simply its virtues 
gone wrong. A vice is generally the reverse of a virtue. 
In the early days of the use of coins, when the mint- 
ing machines consisted simply of a rough die, a block 
and a hammer, the coin presented one side that was 
very fair in appearance and one that was rough and 
unsightly. Only one side of the metal blank being 
impressed with a device, the reverse was a distorted 
travesty of the obverse. In like manner, the failings 



THE CHUECH AND SOCIETY. 207 

of men are the reverse of the divine image, they are 
travesties upon the virtues of men. There is a pro- 
found meaning in that promise of the prophet Isaiah 
that the sins of his people shall be made white as 
snow though they are red as blood, that though they 
are as crimson they shall be white as wool. It points 
to something more than the forgiveness of sins as we 
commonly understand it, the erasing, as it were, of the 
records of the book of life and the presenting of the 
cleaned pages for new and better entries. Does it not 
rather point to the reversal of the die, the transform- 
ing of every vice into its corresponding virtue, the 
freeing of these human instincts, with all their vast 
capabilities for good, from the bondage in which they 
have been held, the filling of them with a new spirit 
and life and the development of them into the orna- 
ments and supports that they were designed to be. 
Our Lord, you remember, said that when the man sim- 
ply cleaned out the abode of the evil spirit and left it 
empty, the spirit returned again and brought seven 
others, each worse than itself, so that the last state of 
that man was a great deal worse than his first. An 
empty heart, an empty mind, an empty life, — these are 
not purity. They are the holes and corners that all 
the iniquity in the world is seeking to make its lair in. 
We have not always been clear in our conception of 
the nature of man and the duty of the Church toward 
him. We have generally assumed that the nature 
of man is all wrong, that his characteristics are the 
gift of the devil and not of God, and that the work of 
the Christian influences is to destroy that nature, rid 
him of those natural characteristics and provide him 



208 THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 

with a new nature and new qualities in their stead. Is 
it not rather the fact that God made man in his own 
image ? How can we say with one breath that man 
is wholly vile and his nature utterly lost in sin and 
prone to all evil, and with the next that he is a child 
of God ? Is it not a flat contradiction ? Man is God's 
child, made in his own image, sharing his attributes 
and qualities, even to his divinity, in such measure as 
his inferior capabilities will allow. He lacks apprecia- 
tion of himself, of his nature, of the meaning of his 
powers, of the capabilities of his life. He lacks com- 
prehension of the proper use and the true values of 
his own powers, nature and instincts. He is not 
master of himself, and has allowed the lower parts of 
his nature to rule the higher because, very largely, 
of this ignorance and blindness. The work of the 
religious influences is to show to him the things that 
he has not seen, — to show him the meanings of his 
life, the capabilities of his nature, the truth as to his 
position and his divine birthright. It should show 
him what he is intended to be and may be, and should 
help, inspire and encourage him to be that. It should 
seek to help him in all ways to obtain the mastery of 
himself and set his higher being in control of the lower, 
so that the divine spark that glows in his bosom, in- 
stead of being hidden and almost extinguished by the 
flesh which must encase it in a material world, shall 
illuminate that flesh and shine through it as the glow- 
ing carbon in the incandescent light illuminates the 
glass globe in which it must be confined and sheds 
abroad its light through the medium of the confining 
agency itself. Religion must take these human in- 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 209 

stincts and turn them into their proper channels. It 
must not maim and circumscribe life by destroying them. 
It is not to be wondered at that men have so often 
supposed that Christianity emasculated life, deprived 
it of much that was precious and made men less manly 
and women less womanly. There is room for more 
than a suspicion that the supposition has some basis 
in fact. It is time that we learned that it is not the 
business of religion to empty life but to fill it, not to 
make it narrow but to make it larger, not to impoverish 
it but to enrich it. Jesus used to say that his religion 
was life. He was speaking to a very simple folk when 
he said it, and yet we may be sure that they under- 
stood what he meant. He meant that no man un- 
derstood the fulness of life, the joy of living and using 
the powers that God had given him, the real largeness 
and richness and power of life, unless his soul had been 
kindled to life at the fires of God's altars and every 
fibre of his being had felt the glow of the heavenly 
flame. Religion never points to self-indulgence. It 
never leads the way to that indulgence in passion 
which leads to satiety and disgust and sin, but it does 
point toward the uplifting and the ennobling and the 
glorifying of the whole man so that his enlarged and 
glorified life shall seem new. It does not say to you 
and me, "Be somebody else," but ''Be your own best 
self. Put those instincts of yours on the right road. 
Enlist them in the divine service. Get out of them 
that which they were intended to do for you, and your 
life shall become so uplifted and so infinitely more 
splendid than it has yet been that you shall seem a 
new man because you have just begun to live." 



210 THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 

Not only does tlie Church in denouncing society and 
all its ways misconceive its mission, but it forfeits 
many of its chances of success and ignores the exam- 
ple of its founder and head. It forfeits its chances of 
success because the social instinct in man is imperious. 
It is not a wrong instinct, because it lies at the very 
foundations of the possibilities of his progress. It is 
only as men associate that progress begins, and only 
as those associations enlarge and comprehend increas- 
ingly vast bodies of individuals that that progress be- 
comes rapid and its fruits permanent. It always has, 
and always will have, large influence in ruling the acts 
of men. They will associate together for play as well 
as for work. They do so associate, as matter of fact, 
and if the Church frowns upon that association with 
all that it implies they will simply withdraw that side 
of their lives from the Church's supervision, and finally, 
probably, withdraw their whole lives from it. This 
imperious social instinct, which is not wrong, and is 
so influential, must be dealt with in our projects for 
reformation. There can be no doubt that many of the 
things we most deplore in our modern life are the 
products of the deliberate depraving of that instinct 
by men who pander to its worst aspects and encourage 
its wildest excesses for their own gain. The brothel, 
the gambling hell and above all the saloon are largely 
supported by this instinct in its unwise and depraved 
forms. Many men go from poor or unhappy homes 
to these places more for the light and stir and socia- 
bility that they find there than for any other purpose, 
though, being there, they yield themselves more and 
more to the spirit and life of the place. The keepers 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 211 

of these places know very well this need of humanity 
and they know, too, in how many cases the need is 
not adequately supplied by anything accessible. They 
know that men, and women too, are not fond of soli- 
tude or of unattractive surroundings. They do all 
that they can to make their places attractive. Lights, 
company, music, luxurious surroundings of every sort, 
everything that can be thought of to draw in the lonely 
seeker after comfort and society, is used as the bait to 
the infernal hook concealed within. Here, as in so 
many other cases, the children of the kingdom may 
learn something from the wisdom of the sons of dark- 
ness. No dealing with humanity, no effort at reform, 
no striving after better living, can be successful that 
does not take into account this important factor in the 
great problem. Let there be no shade of misunder- 
standing here. There is not the slightest intention to 
justify the existence of such places as have been re- 
ferred to, to palliate or extenuate the crime and folly 
of patronizing them, keeping them or allowing them 
to be kept, or to recognize them even as necessary 
evils. The writer is decided in his opinion that they 
not only ought to be abolished, but could be abolished. 
Nor is there any intention to favor, even by implica- 
tion, the plan to starve them out by the mere rivalry 
of coffee-houses and similar places. Such rivalry is 
foredoomed by the conditions to inevitable failure. 
The proposed counter irritant is altogether too mild. 
There is very little room for doubt, however, that the 
coffee-house, or something answering the same general 
purpose of supplying the natural and legitimate human 
craving for society, is a necessity, not as a substitute 



212 THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 

for abolition but as a part of it. We read that at one 
time during tbe prevalence of a frightful famine in 
France the bones of the dead were disinterred and 
ground into a hideous kind of flour which the starving 
people devoured^ only to substitute the pains of disease 
for the pains of hunger. The nature of man hungers 
irresistibly after society. Failing better food, he will 
devour the poisoned bread that is offered him by those 
whose sole interest is to get his means, and whose in- 
genuity has made the poison appear more attractive 
than the more wholesome food that he really needs. 
No attempt to reform or Christianize men can succeed 
unless it recognizes this fundamental human instinct 
and deals with it intelligently. Failing such recogni- 
tion, such efforts are doomed to lose their hold on 
human life. 

It was certainly our Lord's custom to recognize, 
encourage and join the social life of his time. Much 
of his most effective work was done on these occa- 
sions. He lived externally as other men lived, sat at 
their tables, allowed himself to be the central figure 
of their entertainments, and, apparently with design, 
mingled largely with their social life. We need only 
a word to remind us of the marriage feast at Cana, 
the supper given by Matthew, the supper at the house 
of Zaccheus, and the days with the family at Bethany. 
He seemed to feel the need of the ministrations that 
this side of life offered, and to rejoice at the opportun- 
ity to use another open door into the hearts and lives 
of men. When we think, indeed, of the Christian's 
withdrawal of himself, his presence and his influence 
from that side of human life that is perhaps most 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 213 

liable to error, and so most in need of every possible 
help, ought we not to think also of that uniform 
teaching of the Bible that the worst human condition, 
the last divine punishment for the deepest sin, is the 
withdrawal of the divine presence? The last and 
most hopeless word of condemnation spoken by 
Jehovah upon his faithless people was the declaration 
that their house was left to them desolate. The glory 
no longer rested upon the mercy-seat between the wings 
of the adoring cherubim in the Holy of Holies ; the 
God they had betrayed no longer cared for the splen- 
did temple they had built for his worship ; the voice 
of the prophet was silent, the miserable people were 
left to die by their own blind devices. If the social 
life of men is to be deprived of the presence and help 
of those who have received something of the higher 
life and brighter light, if it is to be left altogether in 
the hands of those who seek it for the gratification of 
the senses, if the man who, in obedience to the cravings 
of his nature, goes to it for relaxation must go to a 
region unblessed and uncheered by the presence of 
the wiser and better of God's children, is there any- 
thing that can prevent its going from bad to worse 
till the worst that pious minds have ever dreamed as 
to the enormity of its wickedness shall be tame in 
comparison with the facts ? Is not the Church 
stretching to the utmost, and beyond, the power of 
condemnation and of excommunication when it tries to 
shut from so large a sphere of human interest the 
holy influences which God pours into the world 
through the lives of his faithful children ? 

The second alternative presents attractions to many 



214 THE CHUECH AXD SOCIETY. 

minds. Not a few attempt to make tlie Church or 
the parish a social centre, to provide through its 
various agencies for the social life of its people and 
to fill by direct supply the demand for society and 
for amusement. To a certain extent, perhaps this is 
wise. It is certainly desirable that those who are to 
work together should know each other. The closer 
the bands of friendly intercourse can be drawn between 
the workers in the same field, the better for the suc- 
cess of the work. It is well also that the Church 
should make some official recognition of its apprecia- 
tion of the fact that men need to be entertained and 
give its official sanction to certain kinds of entertain- 
ments. It is wise perhaps to give some employment 
to the talents of those whose abilities lie especially 
on the social side, and who can both give and receive 
pleasure by their efforts at entertaining their friends. 
Sometimes it seems necessary, though the necessity 
is to be deplored, for a parish to resort to entertain- 
ments for the purpose of raising money. Such a parish 
is greatly to be pitied. Xo parish is sound or safe, 
no parish can do effectively its proper work with either 
individuals or the community at large, when compelled 
to resort to social and amusement enterprises for the 
payment of its regular expenses. The best thing that 
the people of that parish can do is to get together 
at once and solemnly pledge themselves that they will 
put directly into the offertory plate all the money that 
they would put either directly or indirectly into the 
entertainments. The parish will do better work, the 
individual members will get more help out of it and 
the cash balance will probably be larger at the end of 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 215 

the year. These things are well enough incidentally 
and for special purposes, indeed may be productive 
of much good, but as a regular reliance for revenue 
they are broken reeds that pierce the hand that leans 
upon them. That the Church should have a distinct 
social life of its own, and that that social life should be 
educative and helpful, are true, but these things should 
always be kept secondary to the true work of the 
Church. The true work of the Church has to do 
with other and higher things. It has work to do 
which includes, it is true, the renovation of society, 
but includes many other things as well. 

Two considerations should be kept always in mind 
in deciding the degree of importance that the social 
work of a Church should receive. In the first place, 
the Church has no business to enter the field as a pur- 
veyor of the amusements of the people. It has no 
business to furnish their education, to enact their laws 
or to decide their disputes. It certainly is not called 
upon to provide their amusements. That field is occu- 
pied by well-equipped agencies whose sole business it 
is, and which are amply provided with means and ad- 
ministered by specialists of training and experience. 
In any except the smallest communities, and to a 
rapidly increasing degree even there, the Church that 
enters the field as a purveyor of entertainments is 
simply placing itself in the unworthy and undignified 
position of doing something it has no business to do and 
doing it rather badly at that. In the second place, — 
and just here there is a deal of loose thinking done, — 
the bond of union between the members of a parish 
is not a social one and their relation to each other is 



216 THE CHURCH AKD SOCIETY. 

not a social relation. The relation is a religious rela- 
tion, and tlie bond that unites them is a religious bond. 
It presupposes a knowledge of each other, it implies 
a real affection for each other, and it is deeper and 
higher than any merely social relation can ever be, 
but it is quite consistent with the absence of what are 
commonly held to be social relations. Our strictly 
social relations arise out of a variety of things, — neigh- 
borhood, congenial dispositions, similarity of tastes 
or pursuits, equality of condition as regards means, 
leisure, cultivation or opportunities. Our religious 
relations are larger and more inclusive, and arise from 
higher sources. We are associated in our Church life 
because we love and worship the same God, follow the 
same Christ, recognize the same opinions as true and 
are engaged in the same work for God and humanity. 
The ideal Church comprehends all sorts and conditions 
of men. It is a very great misfortune for a Church to 
have all its members rich or all poor, all educated or 
all uneducated, all fashionable or all unfashionable. 
Such a Church is one-sided and narrow. Half its 
opportunities for helpfulness are gone because, instead 
of standing as a living example of the brotherhood 
that should unite men, it is a constant reminder of the 
differences that separate them. The Church should be 
inclusive in its membership, in order that all classes of 
men may meet and mingle in it on terms of absolute 
and entire equality, learning thus to value and appre- 
ciate each other, to understand each other better and 
to feel and exercise a real love for humanity, a love by 
no means inconsistent with preference in the selection 
of intimates. We may learn something here from the 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 217 

conduct of our Lord, who certainly loved humanity as 
it has never been loved before or since save by the 
great heart of God, but who admitted the individual 
men and women who composed that humanity to very 
varying degrees of intimacy. There was the great 
crowd constantly coming and going. There were the 
disciples from whom the seventy were chosen. There 
were the twelve, elected to stand very near him, and 
there was even an inner circle of three who stood in 
closer relations than the other nine. The members of 
a parish meet as brethren for worship and for work. 
They feel that special tenderness toward each other 
which is always anxious to lighten the burdens of 
a fellow member. They meet as friends in those gath- 
erings which are provided to enable them to get to 
know each other better, but each has, and is justified 
in having, his own company of friends and intimates 
who make up the social circle in which he spends his 
life. The member of the parish has no more right to 
expect that he be admitted to that circle on the basis 
of his parish relation than the member of that circle 
has to expect to be admitted to the parish family on 
the basis of his social relation. The two things are 
entirely separate and distinct. The matter is not 
remedied by a teaching that the parish members should 
be careful to form their social relations all within 
Church or parish lines. Such a course shuts the 
parish life too much up in itself, throws back the 
influence which should be rayed outwards, narrows 
sympathy, promotes bigotry, issues in countless ills. 
The more feelers the parish can throw out around 
itself the more vigorous its life and growth. It needs 



218 THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 

to receive impressions from every side, and to keep 
itself keenly alive to those impressions and to their 
significance. It needs also to have these feelers as 
outlets for its energy, channels through which its in- 
fluence shall reach and touch the community. The 
atmosphere of a Church should always be warm and 
kindly, the meeting-house should always be a home to 
every person who shows his face there. His greeting 
should be pleasant, and his invitation to a share of the 
worship and the work should be warm. We all know 
these things, though but few have the tact, and perhaps 
also the courage, to realize them in conduct. But on 
the other hand, the person who makes his Church 
home in any particular place because it is the Church 
home of people he would like to know has a very 
unworthy motive for his choice. We may learn some- 
thing from our Catholic brethren in this regard. It is 
a very common thing for Protestants when entering 
a new town to take sittings in the Church that seems 
to them to have the highest standing in the social 
world, even though they may be entirely out of real 
sympathy with its work and creed and there may be 
in the place a struggling band of believers in the faith 
of their youth in sore need of all the help they can 
command. Who ever knew a rich Catholic to attend 
a Protestant Church when he changed his residence 
just because the rich people were Protestants and the 
Catholics all poor ? To him his Church relation is 
religious, not social. The family that is dissatisfied 
because, after a couple of appearances in a meeting- 
house, they are not overwhelmed with the social at- 
tentions of other attendants or who cannot worship 



THE CHUECH AND SOCIETY. 219 

in a certain Cliurcli because they are not admitted at 
once into the social life of a few people who are looked 
np to as persons it is good to know have, to speak 
mildly, very rudimentary ideas of the purpose and 
mission of the Christian Church and of the proper 
ends of worship. 

There remains the third course, the effort to take 
this social life of humanity and inspire it with new 
power and new purpose, realize from it its latent pos- 
sibilities and make it helpful toward the improve- 
ment of life. As has been already said, this policy 
has to a certain extent been forced upon the Church by 
the logic of the situation. The social instinct has 
proved too strong for the artificial barriers that have 
been set up before it. The social life of the religious 
people of this country has gone on constantly enlarg- 
ing as the years have passed. The best and stanchest 
Church people have taken their places in the widen- 
ing circle. They have neither restricted their social 
life to the circles of their own denominational affilia- 
tions, nor have they held fast to the somewhat cir- 
cumscribed limits of the social diversions sanctioned 
by Church authority. In deference to the traditional 
positions of the past, the official voice of the Churches 
is raised in opposition to many of the ordinary usages 
and amusements of society, but in every denomination 
there are increasing numbers of people who disregard 
these oppositions, and that without any detriment to 
the nobility and usefulness of their Christian lives. 
On the other hand, they have done and are doing 
much to set a higher standard for social life. The 
presence in any social circle of men and women 



220 THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 

who are religious without cant, moral without aus- 
terity, and earnest without extravagance, must in- 
evitably elevate the entire moral tone of such cir- 
cles, repress evil tendencies and restrain excesses. 
Would it not be more wise and more consistent for 
the Church to drop its attitude of distrust and sus- 
picion, and throw its vast influence in the direction 
of just this kind of work? The social life of men 
can be redeemed from many of its failings by a setting 
forth of its purposes and its possibilities. God gave 
men the social instinct as he gave them their other 
instincts, that they might make it the means of growth 
and development. The social life of men brings them 
a relaxation from the strain of labor that they greatly 
need. They need it physically, mentally and spirit- 
ually. We have all seen enough of those persons 
who try to live without such relaxation to know well 
enough the evil results of so mistaken a course. They 
wear out, or, to use the more exact and expressive term 
of the machinist, they cut out physically. They nar- 
row mentally. They dwarf and harden spiritually. 
Excess, however, is not relaxation. The man who 
pursues his business with the ardor of a modern 
American during the hours of business, and then 
throws himself headlong into the swiftest stream of 
pleasure he can find, is not resting himself ; he is 
simply cutting out his machine at two points instead 
of one, burning his life -candle at both ends. The 
purpose of relaxation is the prolonging of life and 
the increasing of its power. The man who lives out 
of contact with his fellows loses the mental stimulus 
of the contact of mind with mind, the mental balance 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 221 

wMch comes from the comparison of one's ideas with 
those of others and their correction thereby, the 
modesty that comes from contact with others of equal 
or superior attainments to one's own. Worst of all, 
he loses that true sympathy and appreciation, and that 
genuine charity, in the Pauline use of the word, that 
are possible only as men come into touch with their 
fellows on all sides of their lives. We have seen the 
consequences of failure to maintain such contact 
strikingly illustrated in the development of strained 
relations between the clergy and the great body of 
the laity. With the decay of the absolute authority 
of the pulpit, there has come a loss of influence over 
the pews. Between the pulpit and the pew a gulf 
has opened and widened, a gulf caused largely by the 
feeling that the minister lives a life so different from 
that of the layman that, save in the one point of his 
official duty as the representative of the religion they 
both feel, they have nothing in common. The aver- 
age layman may love and honor his pastor very highly, 
but he feels that his whole life and thought are so 
far out of the range of that pastor's life and thought 
and even possible knowledge and sympathy that, 
unless he feels some special religious need, he can get 
but very little help from him, and even then he is 
liable to go to the clergyman with a shuddering feel- 
ing that this man cannot possibly understand his 
thought and his needs. This is simply an illustration 
of the law that men must come close together, not at 
one point of contact merely, but in their whole lives, 
before they can develop the real sympathy that should 
exist between them. 



^22 THE CHITRCH AKt) SOCIETY. 

The helpful possibilities of this close intercourse of 
men are absolutely unlimited. The high ideal of the 
one may become the possession of all, the vision of 
some possible attainment which has dawned upon the 
sight of a favored soul may be revealed to the eyes of 
many, the thoughts which purify and uplift a single 
mind and heart may be made living forces by their 
free dissemination, and so on indefinitely. Man feels 
the social instinct strong within him. Man yields al- 
ways to that instinct and seeks its gratification through 
channels wise or unwise according to the degree of his 
own advancement and to the amount of help he gets 
from his brethren. He can be helped much by in- 
struction as to what constitutes a wise use of his social 
life. He can be helped more by the spectacle of men 
and women living a pure and happy and useful social 
life in the name of Christ and his Church, just such a 
life as 'our Lord himself led, in its social aspects, when 
he was with us in the flesh. The Christian can help 
society by his presence in it, and it sorely needs his 
help. His intercourse with his fellows, the insight 
which they will get into his life and the new concep- 
tion which they will acquire of the fulness and happi- 
ness of that which they had thought necessarily bare 
and morose, will do more to purify and uplift society 
and educate it into conception of its possibilities than 
all the formal instruction that can possibly be given. 
The old Psalmist was wise when he exhorted men to 
taste and see that the Lord is good. He knew that 
all the telling in the world would never convince them 
of the fact. They must taste and see it. All the in- 
struction and all the telling in the world will not con- 



THE CHUKCH AND SOCIETY. 223 

vince an erring society that its ways are wrong, that 
its happiness is a sham, that the Christian spirit in 
society makes it tenfold better and tenfold happier 
than it can be without. It can only learn these things 
which it so sorely needs to know by actual social 
contact with Christian men and women, who carry 
their Christianity into their social life, and carry it 
there not as a stiff shell or a chilling emanation but 
as a living, loving force in their hearts, a force that 
works silently but fails not to influence those who 
come into contact with it. The work of the Church 
on society is twofold. By its agencies of instruction 
and exhortation it should point out the need for social 
life, the purposes of social life and the possibilities of 
social life. Through the labors of its individual mem- 
bers it should give ocular demonstration of what it 
means. The Church should always impress on its 
members their absolute and binding duty to carry their 
religion into their lives, to make themselves the wires 
which shall carry the spiritual power of the gospel to 
a dull and apathetic world, to be always doers of the 
word and not hearers merely. Let the Christian go 
into society, and when he is there let him be a Chris- 
tian still. So doing he will be a missionary, a mis- 
sionary of that glorious gospel which contemplates the 
discipling of the nations, the regeneration of society 
and the salvation of the world as well as the conver- 
sion, regeneration and salvation of individual souls. 

A final word with regard to the details of conduct. 
This whole matter is not a question of details, but of 
principles. It is a question of where the centre of 
gravity, so to speak, of the life is located. The right- 



^24 THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 

ness or the wrongness of a man's social life does not 
depend on the answer to the question, "Do you do 
this, that or the other thing ? " It depends on the 
answer to the question, "What are you living for? 
Are you living for pleasure, or are you living for God 
and your own best self ? " If you are living for 
pleasure you are wrong, and it does not greatly matter 
how you are in the habit of taking that pleasure. If 
you are living for God and your own best self, which 
is made in God's image, you are right. If these lect- 
ures have accomplished any part of the writer's desire, 
they have shown that he at least is convinced that 
religion should lie at the heart of a man, vitalizing and 
purifying everything that he does, and that the Church, 
which is organized religion, should lie at the heart of 
society, which is organized humanity, vitalizing and 
purifying every part of its life. The ideal religion is 
not that which sends a man into a cell in a monastery 
or a cave in a desert and pours out his life in prayer 
and contemplation, a river lost in a sandy desert. It is 
a religion that sends him to the workshop, or the 
schoolroom, or the editor's chair, or the ballot box, 
or the committee meeting, or the dinner party and 
puts into whatever he does there the very best and 
most consecrated effort of which he is capable to make 
that deed honorable to himself, helpful to his neigh- 
bor and acceptable to his God. The kingdom of God 
on earth is a good deal more than the Church as we 
commonly understand the word. It is a state of human 
society where the divine possibilities of every human 
institution and every human activity are understood 
and realized. The mission of the Church as the teacher 



THE CHURCH AND SOCIETY. 225 

and the evangelizer of the nations is to teach them to 
seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness 
and to show them that law and government^ art and 
science and education, business and charity and social 
life all can and should be made to contribute some- 
thing to that search for their own ennobling and for 
the good of humanity. 

The preparation of these papers has been a labor 
of love, a pleasure rather than a burden. It will 
have been a source of profound gratitude to our 
common Father if through their agency some soul 
shall have been aroused to larger thought as to the 
mission of the Church, led to larger' views as to 
the province of religion, stirred to greater effort in the 
cause of God and humanity or helped and encour- 
aged in the doing of its own individual work. May 
God grant that we may each and every one of us come 
at last to sound the depths of the meaning of that 
simple but marvellously comprehensive phrase of our 
daily prayer, " Thy kingdom come." 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson ParK Dnve 
Cranberry Township PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



Go 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



014 479 738 3 




